How Costly is Hospital Quality? A Revealed‐Preference Approach
通过患者选择推断医院质量，发现非临床质量（如患者体验）成本高昂且与生产率正相关，对医院竞争和成本有重要影响。
We analyze the cost of quality improvement in hospitals, dealing with two challenges. Hospital quality is multidimensional and hard to measure, while unobserved productivity may influence quality supply. We infer the quality of hospitals in Los Angeles from patient choices. We then incorporate ‘revealed quality’ into a cost function, instrumenting with hospital demand. We find that revealed quality differentiates hospitals, but is not strongly correlated with clinical quality. Revealed quality is quite costly, and tends to increase with hospital productivity. Thus, non-clinical aspects of the hospital experience (perhaps including patient amenities) play important roles in hospital demand, competition, and costs.