Collusion in the Private Health Insurance Market: Empirical Evidence for Chile

In September 2005, the Chilean Competition Authority filed a complaint against the 5 largest private health insurance providers for violation of antitrust laws. The 5 providers were accused of colluding to reduce the coverage of the plans offered to customers between March 2002 and March 2003. The main fact is that during that period these 5 providers reduced the coverage offered from 100% for hospitalization and 80% for ambulatory care to 90% and 70% respectively. As usual the observation of parallel conduct is not enough to infer collusion and it is required to observe additional factors that allow us to reject the hypothesis of providers behaving competitively. In this paper, we show that some specific characteristics of the health insurance markets generate barriers to entry and switching costs that allow the possibility of a collusive agreement. Then, we adapt an imperfect competition model of product differentiation to derive some testable propositions that allow us to distinguish between competition and collusion outcomes in the health insurance market in Chile. Finally, we show econometric evidence consistent with a collusive agreement among the 5 largest providers and inconsistent with a competitive equilibrium. . In particular, by comparing the prosecuted and non-prosecuted open Isapres before and during the collusive period, we show that sales efforts of the accused Isapres were reduced during the transition period toward lower-quality plans, that the profitability of the two groups of Isapres increased, and that the rate of transfers within the group of accused Isapres fell during the transition period.Tacit Collusion, Isapres, Health Insurance, Conscious Parallelism, Plus Factors.

Norms beyond Empire

Norms beyond Empire seeks to rethink the relationship between law and empire by emphasizing local normative production. Its ten chapters explore normative production by focusing on case studies from the Iberian empires in China, India, Japan, and the Philippines. ; Readership: All interested in legal history, the history of Christianity in Asia, the history of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism, early modern colonialism, missionary history, global history, and legal pluralism

Scalar Perturbations of two-dimensional Horava-Lifshitz Black Holes

In this article, we study the stability of black hole solutions found in the context of dilatonic Horava-Lifshitz gravity in $1+1$ dimensions by means of the quasinormal modes approach. In order to find the corresponding quasinormal modes, we consider the perturbations of massive and massless scalar fields minimally coupled to gravity. In both cases, we found that the quasinormal modes have a discrete spectrum and are completely imaginary, which leads to damping modes. For a massive scalar field and a non-vanishing cosmological constant, our results suggest unstable behaviour for large values of the scalar field mass.Comment: 18 pages, 1 figure. Accepted version in EPJC. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:gr-qc/070109

Norms beyond Empire

Norms beyond Empire seeks to rethink the relationship between law and empire by emphasizing local normative production. Its ten chapters explore normative production by focusing on case studies from the Iberian empires in China, India, Japan, and the Philippines. ; Readership: All interested in legal history, the history of Christianity in Asia, the history of Spanish and Portuguese imperialism, early modern colonialism, missionary history, global history, and legal pluralism

Diseño de la Subasta Optima para el Seguro de Invalidez y Sobreviviencia en Chile

Este artículo estudia la forma óptima de implementar el proceso de adjudicación del seguro de invalidez y sobrevivencia en Chile. Nuestro trabajo concluye que dadas las características con que fue diseñado el sistema de invalidez y sobrevivencia, y atendiendo a la estructura de la industria de seguros en el país, la subasta óptima es una combinación de subasta japonesa o (en este caso) descendente con salida en una primera etapa, con una subasta holandesa (primer precio sobre cerrado) en una segunda etapa. Nuestra propuesta considera las preocupaciones por la eficiencia de la subasta, las posibilidades de comportamientos anticompetitivos en ella, el deseo de favorecer la entrada de nuevos competidores y la siempre y necesaria simpleza de la propuesta. Más allá del interés particular en la subasta del Seguro de Invalidez y Sobrevivencia, el artículo presenta una revisión de la literatura de subastas accesible para no especialistas en el temaSubastas, Seguro de Invalidez y Sobrevivencia, Fondos de Pensiones

¿César contra Pompeyo? nuevos hallazgos para el estudio de la inscripción SCAE en las glandes de honda de Hispania

Estudiamos 11 proyectiles de honda de plomo procedentes de un área rural localizada 1,5 km al SE de la localidad de Huete, en la provincia de Cuenca. Las piezas pertenecen a una colección privada. El objetivo de este trabajo identificar y analizar su tipología, y epigrafía a fin de averiguar su cronología, discernir las causas de su presencia en esta zona y aportar nuevos datos a la interpretación de las glandes de Hispania con la inscripción latina SCAEWe study 11 lead slingshot from a rural area located 1.5 km southeast from the town of Huete (province of Cuenca). The pieces belong to a private collection. The aim of this paper is to identify and analyze their type and epigraphy in order to find out their chronology, discern the causes of their presence in this area and provide new data to the interpretation of the glandes from Hispania with the Latin inscription SCA

the Latin-American social question in the Latin-American scientific congresses (1898-1908)

This article focuses on the circulation of ideas on social policies in Latin America through the discussions in the Latin-American scientific congresses. The main argument is that, although Latin-American scholars relied on European narratives to frame the social problems that affected the region, the policy solutions they found were not based on the direct importation of foreign models. Either by emphasising criminality or the need for social reform, scholars sought to address the social question through regional mechanisms which were the outgrowth of regional processes of knowledge transfe

Hypercyclicity for the Elements of the Commutant of an Operator

ABSTRACT:Given a bounded linear operator T acting on a complex Banach space, we obtain a spectral condition implying that each operator in the commutant of T different from ?I has a hypercyclic multiple, and we show several examples of operators satisfying this condition. We emphasize that for some of these examples we do not have a description of the commutant of T

Nature, Bodies, and Land: Reframing Ownership and Property in Early Modern Spanish America

Rooted in medieval juridical thinking, early modern legal culture saw commu- nity’s law as the expression of an underlying order of things, something defined not by the willing agreement of the parts that constituted the community, but rather by nature and nurture. For the Iberian world, this belief was expressed in the idea of the ‘señorío natural’, which according to legal doctrine was a bond that linked subjects to the land where they were born and subjected them to a common jurisdiction (Hespanha, Uncommon Laws ). Communities and all kinds of corpo- rate bodies thus also had a natural origin, which points to an intertwinement, and not a contradiction, between nature and different kinds of collective bodies. These bodies—corporations, guilds, communities, families, and so on—were the basis for the assignment of rights, obligations, privileges, and duties, but also for the dis- tribution of access to land. This article seeks to reframe ownership and property within this framework as a way of rethinking the ways in which communities defined their relations to land

Fusión Procompetitiva y Economías de escala en el Mercado de AFPs

Este trabajo cumple con dos objetivos principales. En primer lugar, se estima la función de costos de las administradoras de fondos de pensiones en Chile usando datos de panel desde 2000 a 2007. Se encuentran importantes economías de escala en la provisión de los servicios financieros, resultado que es consistente con otros estudios para este mismo mercado. En segundo lugar, basado en la evidencia econométrica y tomando como antecedente una fusión específica en este mercado, se muestra que la fusión de dos firmas medianas que conforman una de gran tamaño podría mejorar el bienestar social por la vía de incrementar la competencia en el mercado. Este último resultado depende de dos fuerzas que operan en sentido antagónico: menos firmas reducen la competencia en la industria, pero una firma más grande se comporta más agresivamente y así incrementa la competencia.Fusiones, Economías de Escala, Bienestar Social, Fondos de Pensiones