This article considers how the 'accidental logics' of political settlements for the English National Health Service (NHS) and the Medicare and Medicaid programmes in the United States have resulted in different institutional arrangements and different implicit social contracts for rationing, which we define to be the denial of health care that is beneficial but is deemed to be too costly. This ...

General Equilibrium and the Emergence of (Non) Market Clearing Trading Institutions We consider a pure exchange economy, where for each good several trading institutions are available, only one of which is market-clearing. The other feasible trading institutions lead to rationing. To learn on which trading institutions to coordinate, traders follow behavioural rules of thumb that are based on t...

Introduction Thirty years ago, the rationing of healthcare was invisible and silent. Recently, however, healthcare expenditures have become a major focus of public policy. As we look for ways to control spending, we become more aware of the economic trade-offs involved in every healthcare decision. Allocating resources to one service means less left for other services; allocating resources to o...

This paper develops a theory of the firm, and equilibrium credit rationing mechanisms in oligopoly with R&D-product market competition. Credit rationing arises from a hold-up problem between wealth-constrained entrepreneurs and external investors. Underinvestment occurs if entrepreneurial wealth constraint is binding, even though the equilibrium corporate governance structure addresses the hold...

In multi-unit auctions, such as auctions of commodities and securities, and financial exchanges, it is necessary to specify rationing rules to break ties between multiple marginal bids. The standard approach in the literature and in pratice is to ration marginal bids proportionally. This paper shows how bidding can be made more competitive if the rationing rule instead gives increasing priority...

The U.S. has focused attention on the rising costs of health care coincident with the increasing age of the population. Arguments have been made to overtly ration care to older persons; however, general acceptance of the need to ration scarce resources, whether or not such a policy is actually formalized, can lead to covert rationing. Some overt rationing has already occurred, some of the data ...

This paper considers alternative means of rationing access to outdoor recreation areas, focussing on rock-climbing sites in Scotland. Such rationing is deemed increasingly important due to crowding and environmental externalities, yet cultural and practical considerations mean that a system of simple entry fees to mountain areas is unrealistic. We use a repeated nested multinomial logit model t...

We report the results of duopoly market experiments where firms first commit to capacities and then compete in prices. The theoretical literature pertaining to these duopoly models suggests that the way residual demand is rationed is fundamental to the character of equilibrium outcomes when capacity costs are sufficiently low. The experiments test this prediction by varying capacity cost and de...