Digitalisierung im Gesundheitswesen — zwischen Datenschutz und moderner Medizinversorgung

The digital transformation of the healthcare branch is important and unstoppable. The enormous possibility of digitalisation to redesign and enhance processes has been shown in other branches. Digital technologies offer the similarly large potential to improve the quality and efficiency of healthcare services. However, in terms of digitalisation, the German health system lags behind other European countries. But given a lack of available evidence, the effects of the digitalisation of the healthcare system cannot be reliably evaluated. Digital access to patient data necessitates constructive error cultures in organisations in order to limit defensive medicine. And digital access to health information necessitates individual competence in searching and using this information for participatory decision-making. As with all technological progress, information security is very important in order to gain citizens’ confidence in a digital healthcare system. Thus, it is necessary to simultaneously pursue both enhanced privacy standards and state-of-the-art medical technology.     

The search for the best deal: How hotel cancellation policies affect the search and booking decisions of deal-seeking customers

This study examined cancellation policies and their role in shaping travelers’ deal-seeking behavior, exploring the impact of cancellation fees and deadlines on three, mutually exclusive, customers’ hotel booking behavior categories: “Book”, “Book and Search”, and “Search”. 291 subjects, who participated in a week long online “booking game”, attempted to book a room in a virtual hotel and get the best deal. The results were tested using small sample t-test for comparing proportions between two independent populations, non-parametric multiple pairwise comparisons, and multinomial logit regression models. The findings indicate that the cancellation deadline affected participants’ behavior while the size of the cancellation fee had no statistically significant impact. In addition, there was no significant difference between lenient cancellation deadline and no cancellation policy.     

Towards Assessing the Knowledge Gap in Medical Tourism

The medical tourism industry is a fast growing global niche market that generated $20 billion in income for destinations around the world. This study suggests and tests a mechanism to assess the medical tourism providers’ perceptions about the tourists’ perceived important product attributes when selecting a medical tourism destination. The results indicate that the various medical tourism providers groups do not vary in their perceptions regarding 24 important attributes of the medical tourism product and that they all agree that tourists perceive the medical variables to be more important than the tourism related variables. Using the Korean market for data collection, the study’s additional contribution is providing insights for Korean government agencies, operators of medical tourism hospitals, policymakers, and marketers.     

Unemployment Insurance and the Business Cycle: What Adjustments are Needed?

During the 2007–2011 economic downturn, the duration that one could collect unemployment insurance (UI) in the United States increased to an unprecedented 99 weeks, and the UI benefit amount increased by $25. This article explores the policy of increasing the generosity of UI during recessions using a model that accounts for the insurance and moral hazard implications of UI as well as the program's impact on job creation. When limited to adjusting the duration of benefits, a more generous UI system is optimal. However, due to UI's negative impact on job creation and the increased cost of providing benefits when unemployment is high, the optimal extension is just 1.3 months. When the government adjusts both the benefit amount and its duration, the optimal policy during downturns is a reduction in the replacement rate. This mitigates the decline in job creation and funds a UI extension of 4.3 months.     

Product Innovation Incentives: Monopoly vs. Competition

In contrast to Arrow's result for process innovations, we show that the gain from a product innovation can be larger to a secure monopolist than to a rivalrous firm that would face competition from independent sellers of the old product. A monopolist incurs profit diversion from its old good but may gain more than a rivalrous firm on the new good by coordinating the prices. In a Hotelling framework, we find simple conditions for the monopolist's gain to be larger. We also explain why the ranking of innovation incentives differs under vertical product differentiation.     

Valuing the implicit guarantee of the Federal National Mortgage Association

The paper analyzes the guarantee of the Federal National Mortgage Association (FNMA). Rather than try to price the guarantee, we used time-series estimates of its value from Kane and Foster to infer the behavior of FNMA in exploiting the guarantee. The results are consistent with a model that predicts that FNMA does not take as much risk as it might. Rather, it trades off risk and return, but it does increase risk and exploit the guarantee when it gets in trouble (as it did in 1981).We have received helpful research assistance from Peter Carr and Bruno Gerard.     

How companies tackle health care costs: Part I.

From the experience of a cross-section of Fortune "500" companies and top nonindustrials, these authors develop a profile of the newer types of health plans and benefits designed to cut health care costs. After examining the various plans, their funding, and their results, however, the authors conclude that another form of health insurance, more like other kinds of insurance policies that cover only catastrophic events, is the most promising from all points of view. In a second article, Regina Herzlinger will examine corporate efforts to reshape the system of supplying health care.