Author: Mircea Ioan MarcuPublisher:
ISBN:
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Languages : en
Pages :
Book Description
Recent developments in the economics of networks have shown the potential fallacies of using one-sided logic in two-sided markets. In the third study I develop a two-sided market model to analyze the pricing and quality decisions of a profit maximizing managed care organization (MCO) in the presence of indirect network externalities between doctors and patients. The managed care organization faces trade-offs when choosing the quality of service, insurance premiums, and physician reimbursements. These trade-offs depend on patient health risk and physician cost distributions, the elasticity of supply of physicians with respect to reimbursements, the marginal cost of service quality, and the marginal utility derived by patients from access to a broader network of physicians and the quality of health services. In the case of iso-elastic distributions of patient health risk and physician cost of treatment, an increase in the cost of providing quality decreases the quality provided by the MCO, which leads to fewer policyholders, lower physician reimbursements, and fewer doctors in the preferred network. The insurance premium also decreases. An increase in the health risk of the population results in lower quality, lower reimbursements, and fewer physicians in the MCO's network. The insurance premium also decreases, but the decrease is smaller than the decrease in individuals' utility due to lower quality and fewer physicians, which leads to fewer policyholders.