Regulation and Capacity Competition in Health Care: Evidence from U.S. Dialysis Markets
研究了美国透析服务提供商的产能进入与扩张决策，评估了增加成本或降低支付的政策对市场结构和利润的影响，发现这些政策会减少市场总产能，但部分提供商的利润下降被竞争反应曲线缓冲。
This paper studies entry and capacity decisions by dialysis providers in the United States. We estimate a structural model where providers make continuous strategic choices of capacity based on their private information about own costs and knowledge of the distribution of competitors’ private information. We evaluate the impact on the market structure and providers’ profits under counterfactual regulatory policies that increase the costs or reduce the payment per unit of capacity. We find that these policies reduce the market capacity as measured by the number of dialysis stations. However, the downward-sloping reaction curve shields some providers from negative profit shocks in certain markets. The paper also has a methodological contribution in that it proposes new estimators for Bayesian games with continuous actions.