The common folklore that giving options to agents will make them more willing to take risks is false. In fact, no incentive schedule will make all expected utility maximizers more or less risk averse. This paper finds simple, intuitive, necessary and sufficient conditions under which incentive schedules make agents more or less risk averse. The paper uses these to examine the incentive effects ...

This study explores the impact of program structure on children's use of care by comparing care use in State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP) and Medicaid covered populations in a State where children share the same provider network and are both in a primary care case management system with the same Medicaid fee structure. We then compare care use in this system to care use in an SCH...

This paper analyzes the effect of overbooking for scheduling systems in a commercial environment. In this scenario each job is associated with a release time and a finishing deadline as well as a fee for a successful execution and a penalty for violating the deadline. The core idea is to exploit overestimations of required job execution times, providing an opportunity to aggressively schedule a...

There is no single schedule of legal fees and the way they are calculated; a rational model of fee determination is acutely needed. This paper presents a decision support system called Rho that allows the user to enter the internal and external data into a set of decision models to determine the strategic pricing for law ®rms. The paper describes the main features of the system, the optimizatio...

The present paper examines whether supplier inducement exists for primary physicians' services in Norway. Our model assumes optimization behavior of the physician. The research design is adapted to the institutional setting of Norwegian primary physician services, where there is a fixed fee schedule. According to our model, the physician has three choices: to rational services, to supply an opt...

In 1992, Medicare reformed its physician payment method by implementing the Medicare fee schedule (MFS), of which the resource-based relative value scale (RBRVS) is a major component. Using a recent survey and case studies, we examine the diffusion of Medicare's RBRVS to non-Medicare payers and how those payers use and perceive the RBRVS and MFS policies. We find that approximately one-third of...

Japan's universal and egalitarian health care system helps to keep its population healthy at an exceptionally low cost. Its financing and delivery systems have been adapted over the years in a gradual way that preserves balance. In particular, its mandatory fee schedule has proved to be effective in controlling spending by manipulating prices. Today, with severe fiscal problems, pressures are m...

The Medicare Physician fee Schedule does not reflect accurately the costs of providing interventional pain management services to Medicare beneficiaries. The practice expense for pain management services are not based on the resources used by interventional pain physicians, but rather, are determined on the practice expenses incurred by the specialities from which the subspecialty derived princ...

The beginning of the transition to a new Medicare payment system will culmin ate nearly a decade of efforts to reform Medicare’s physician payment system. From the start, the AMA has played a leadership role. The AMA has viewed Medicare adoption of a payment schedule based upon a Resource-Based Relative Value Scale (RBRVS) as a means of preserving fee-for-service as a viable Medicare option, an...