1395. Screening or Pooling? Dual-channel Competition in Healthcare under Information Asymmetry
Invited abstract in session TA-53: New Trends in Game Theory IV, stream Game Theory and Mathematical Economics.
Tuesday, 8:30-10:00Room: Liberty Moot Court
Authors (first author is the speaker)
| 1. | Fangyuan CAO
|
| Data and Systems Engineering, University of Hong Kong | |
| 2. | Jie Wang
|
| Southeast University | |
| 3. | Yong-Hong Kuo
|
| Department of of Data and Systems Engineering, The University of Hong Kong | |
| 4. | Feng Tian
|
| The University of Hong Kong |
Abstract
Healthcare platforms, such as HealthTap and Dingxiang Doctor, have gained popularity in recent years due to their convenience and flexibility, competing with in-person hospitals within the market for medical consultations. Although platforms can verify the qualifications of physicians, physicians' actual performance remains unknown to the public. In this research, we consider that, to strive for excellence, the online healthcare provider offers physicians two types of contracts for the service provided: a screening contract and a pooling contract. We develop a sequential game theory model to (i) analyze the optimal contract type to physicians on an online revenue-focused healthcare provider where physician efficiency is private information and (ii) study its effects on healthcare providers and patients in dual-channel competition. We find that, interestingly, the pooling contract may be more beneficial for an online healthcare provider when the failure cost is low, the offline hassle cost is sufficiently high, or it is more likely for a patient to encounter a low-type physician. Our contributions lie in the modeling framework and insights derived for the situation faced by online healthcare providers in managing information asymmetry about physicians, while also considering competition from traditional offline healthcare providers.
Keywords
- Health Care
- Game Theory
- Logistics
Status: accepted
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