Health Care Insurance Payment Policy when the Physician and Patient May Collude

This paper analyzes the three-party contracting problem among the payer, the patient and the physician when the patient and the physician may collude to exploit mutually beneficial opportunities. Under the hypothesis that side transfer is ruled out, we analyze the mechanism design problem when the physician and the patient submit the claim to the payer through a reporting game. To induce truth telling by the two agents, the weak collusion-proof insurance payment mechanism is such that it is sufficient that one of them tells the truth. Moreover, we identify trade-offs of a different nature faced by the payer according to whether incentives are placed on the patient or the physician. We also derive the optimal insurance scheme for the patient and the optimal payment for the physician. Moreover, we show that if the payer is able to ask the two parties to report the diagnosis sequentially, the advantage of the veto power of the second agent allows the payer to achieve the first-best outcome

Worried about Adverse Product Effects? Information Disclosure and Consumer Awareness

Whether consumers are aware of potentially adverse product effects, is key for private and social incentives to disclose information. To obtain a better understanding of this issue we propose a simple monopoly model that highlights the conceptual difference between consumer unawareness and consumer uncertainty. We show that total surplus may be larger in an environment in which consumers are unaware of the potentially adverse effect. We also show that disclosing information whether a particular ingredient is harmful or not increases consumer surplus, but mandatory disclosure of the level of this ingredient may make consumers worse off

Information Disclosure and Consumer Awareness

Whether consumers are aware of potentially adverse product effects is key to private and social incentives to disclose information about undesirable product characteristics. In a monopoly model with a mix of aware and unaware consumers, a larger share of unaware consumers makes information disclosure less likely to occur. Since the firm is not interested in releasing information to unaware consumers, a more precise targeting technology that allows the firm to better keep unaware consumers in the dark leads to more disclosure. A regulator may want to intervene in this market and impose mandatory disclosure rules

Does vertical integration increase product quality?

Numerous product quality scandals are caused by low-quality inputs. When input quality is not perfectly observed by downstream firms, upstream firms often have moral hazard problems. If vertical integration does not directly eliminate the moral hazard problems, does vertical integration still improve product quality? If so, under which conditions? We find that given the precision of monitoring technology used by downstream firms, when the level of public monitoring is very high or very low, downstream firms have no incentive to integrate upstream firms; when the level is intermediate, downstream firms have incentives to integrate and vertical integration increases product quality

Worried about Adverse Product Effects? Information Disclosure and Consumer Awareness

Whether consumers are aware of potentially adverse product effects, is key for private and social incentives to disclose information. To obtain a better understanding of this issue we propose a simple monopoly model that highlights the conceptual difference between consumer unawareness and consumer uncertainty. We show that total surplus may be larger in an environment in which consumers are unaware of the potentially adverse effect. We also show that disclosing information whether a particular ingredient is harmful or not increases consumer surplus, but mandatory disclosure of the level of this ingredient may make consumers worse off

Health Care Insurance Payment Policy when the Physician and Patient May Collude

This paper analyzes the three-party contracting problem among the payer, the patient and the physician when the patient and the physician may collude to exploit mutually beneficial opportunities. Under the hypothesis that side transfer is ruled out, we analyze the mechanism design problem when the physician and the patient submit the claim to the payer through a reporting game. To induce truth telling by the two agents, the weak collusion-proof insurance payment mechanism is such that it is sufficient that one of them tells the truth. Moreover, we identify trade-offs of a different nature faced by the payer according to whether incentives are placed on the patient or the physician. We also derive the optimal insurance scheme for the patient and the optimal payment for the physician. Moreover, we show that if the payer is able to ask the two parties to report the diagnosis sequentially, the advantage of the veto power of the second agent allows the payer to achieve the first-best outcome

Phase Transitions of Boron Carbide: Pair Interaction Model of High Carbon Limit

Boron Carbide exhibits a broad composition range, implying a degree of intrinsic substitutional disorder. While the observed phase has rhombohedral symmetry (space group R3(bar)m), the enthalpy minimizing structure has lower, monoclinic, symmetry (space group Cm). The crystallographic primitive cell consists of a 12-atom icosahedron placed at the vertex of a rhombohedral lattice, together with a 3-atom chain along the 3-fold axis. In the limit of high carbon content, approaching 20% carbon, the icosahedra are usually of type B11Cp, where the p indicates the carbon resides on a polar site, while the chains are of type C-B-C. We establish an atomic interaction model for this composition limit, fit to density functional theory total energies, that allows us to investigate the substitutional disorder using Monte Carlo simulations augmented by multiple histogram analysis. We find that the low temperature monoclinic Cm structure disorders through a pair of phase transitions, first via a 3-state Potts-like transition to space group R3m, then via an Ising-like transition to the experimentally observed R3(bar)m symmetry. The R3m and Cm phases are electrically polarized, while the high temperature R3(bar)m phase is nonpolar