Industry Input in Policy Making: Evidence from Medicare*
研究医疗保险在制定医生服务价格时，行业委员会成员与提案者之间的关联度如何影响价格，发现关联度每增加一个标准差，价格上升10%，且关联度越高，提案中的硬证据越少，但软信息存在权衡。
Abstract In setting prices for physician services, Medicare solicits input from a committee that evaluates proposals from industry. The committee itself comprises members from industry; we investigate whether this arrangement leads to regulatory capture with prices biased toward industry interests. We find that increasing a measure of affiliation between the committee and proposers by one standard deviation increases prices by 10%. We then evaluate whether employing a biased committee as an intermediary may nonetheless be desirable, if greater affiliation allows the committee to extract information needed for regulation. We find industry proposers more affiliated with the committee produce less hard evidence in their proposals. However, on soft information, we find evidence of a trade-off: private insurers set prices that more closely track Medicare prices generated under higher affiliation.