Productivity and Incentives in the Medical Care Sector

Measuring "productivity" in the health care sector is unusually complex. While focusing on several traditional measures of "output" in the health sector, two more encompassing measures, i.e., the quality adjusted life year and the level of patient satisfaction, are also considered. It is also shown that measures designed to gauge productivity in the medical care sector have unintended repercussions on incentives to allocate resources. Copyright 1992 by The editors of the Scandinavian Journal of Economics.

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