infonet-economy

«Risiko Krankenversicherung» beschreibt die soziale und private Krankenversicherung der Schweiz mit statistischen Methoden. Die Verankerung der Autorinnen und Autoren in Wissenschaft und Praxis führt zu einer einzigartigen Mischung aus Analyse und praktischer Erfahrung. Das Buch folgt den aktuellen Fragen zu KVG und VVG: Kostenanstieg, faire Prämienkalkulation, Solvenz, optimaler Risikoausgleich, Entwicklung von Managed Care. Dabei kommen theoretische Konzepte und erfolgreiche Reformen zur Sprache, die z. T. auf die vorangegangenen Auflagen dieses Buches zurückzuführen sind.

There has been a recent interest in reporting p-values adjusted for the resampling-based stepdown multiple testing procedures proposed in Romano and Wolf (2005a,b). The original papers only describe how to carry out multiple testing at a fixed significance level. Computing adjusted p-values instead in an efficient manner is not entirely trivial. Therefore, this paper fills an apparent gap by detailing such an algorithm.

During the 1990s, the social health insurance schemes of Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium and Israel were significantly reformed by the introduction of freedom of choice (open enrolment) of health insurer. This was introduced alongside a system of risk adjustment to compensate health insurers for enrolees with predictable high medical expenses. Despite the similarity in the health insurance reforms in these countries, we find that both the rationale behind these reforms and their impact on consumer choice vary widely.

In this article we seek to explain the observed variation in switching rates by cross-country comparison of the potential determinants of health insurer choice. We conclude that differences in choice setting, and in the net benefits of switching, offer a plausible explanation for the large differences in consumer mobility.

Finally, we discuss the policy implications of our cross-country comparison. We argue that the optimal switching rate crucially depends on the goals of the reforms and the quality of the risk-adjustment system. In view of this, we conclude that switching rates are currently too low in the Netherlands, and an active government policy to encourage consumer mobility seems warranted. In Germany and Switzerland, high switching rates call for an improvement of the rather poor risk-adjustment systems. Given low switching rates in Israel and Belgium, improving risk adjustment is less urgent, but still required in the long run.

Gift-giving customs are ubiquitous in social, political, and business life. Legal regulation and industry guidelines for gifts are often based on the assumption that large gifts have the potential to influence behavior and create confl of interest, but small gifts do not. However, scientific evidence on the impact of small gifts on business relationships is scarce. We conducted a controlled field experiment in collaboration with sales agents of a multinational consumer products company to study the influence of small gifts on the outcome of business negotiations. We find that small gifts matter. On average, sales representatives generate more than twice as much revenue when they distribute a small gift at the onset of their negotiations. However, we also find that small gifts tend to be counterproductive when purchasing and sales agents meet for the first time, underlining that the nature of the business relationship crucially affects the profitability of gifts.