Many countries have opened their health care markets to private for-profit providers, aiming to promote quality and choice for patients. The prices are regulated and providers compete in location and quality. We show that whereas opening a public hospital market typically raises quality, the private provider strategically locates towards the corner of the market to avoid costly quality competition. Social welfare depends on the size of the regulator's budget and on the altruism of the public provider. If the budget is large, high quality results and welfare is highest in a duopoly whenever entry is optimal. If the budget is small, quality levels in a duopoly mirror the quality level in a monopoly. It can be optimal for the regulator not to use the full budget.

This paper examines the evolutionary stability of behaviour in contests where players’ participation can be stochastic. We find, for exogenously given participation probabilities, players exert more effort under the concept of a finite-population evolutionarily stable strategy (FPESS) than under Nash equilibrium (NE). We show that there is ex-ante overdissipation under FPESS for sufficiently large participation probabilities, if, and only if, the impact function is convex. With costly endogenous entry, players enter the contest with a higher probability and exert more effort under FPESS than under NE. Importantly, under endogenous entry, overdissipation can occur for all (Tullock) contest success functions, in particular those with concave impact functions.

We explore how competition between physicians affects medical service provision. Previous research has shown that, without competition, physicians deviate from patient‐optimal treatment under payment systems like capitation and fee‐for‐service. Although competition might reduce these distortions, physicians usually interact with each other repeatedly over time and only a fraction of patients switches providers at all. Both patterns might prevent competition to work in the desired direction. To analyze the behavioral effects of competition, we develop a theoretical benchmark that is then tested in a controlled laboratory experiment. Experimental conditions vary physician payment and patient characteristics. Real patients benefit from provision decisions made in the experiment. Our results reveal that, in line with the theoretical prediction, introducing competition can reduce overprovision and underprovision, respectively. The observed effects depend on patient characteristics and the payment system, though. Tacit collusion is observed and particularly pronounced with fee‐for‐service payment, but it appears to be less frequent than in related experimental research on price competition.

This paper studies welfare consequences of consumer-side market transparency with endogenous entry of firms. Different from most studies, we consider the unique symmetric entry equilibrium, which is in mixed strategies. We identify two effects of market transparency on welfare: a competition effect and a novel market-structure effect. We show, surprisingly, that for almost all demand functions the negative market-structure effect eventually dominates the positive competition effect as the market becomes increasingly transparent. Consumer-side market transparency can therefore be socially excessive even without collusion. The only exception among commonly used demand functions is the set of constant demand functions.