This chapter reviews the theory and empirical literature on physician market power,
behavior, and motives, referred to collectively as the issue of “physician agency.” The …

Ten years ago we developed a model of demand inducement in the physician services
market and explored the properties of that model. We found that predictions concerning …

What is the nature of the industrial organization of the market for physician services? Is the
market “competitive?” Are there pareto‐relevant market failures, such that there is room for …

Health care markets fail to satisfy many requirements for perfect competition, including large
numbers of consumers and firms, zero search costs, and marketability of all goods and …

The physician/patient relationship is a paradigm for any expert/client relationship. The
physician both diagnoses the patient's illness and recommends a treatment. This dual role …

John Wheat review a complex literature on the determinants of consumer behavior in
purchasing health care. Although they concluded that need is the primary determinant of …

In the traditional neoclassical model of supply and demand, prices determine the allocation
of economic resources. The difficulty in applying this model to physician services is the …

This article addresses the impact of financial incentives on physician behavior, focusing on
quality of care. Changing market conditions, evolving social forces, and continuing …

We present a model of the physician–patient relationship extending on the model by Farley
[Farley, PJ, 1986. Theories of the price and quantity of physician services. Journal of Health …

Examples of monopoly in the physicians' services market abound in microeconomic
textbooks. Some texts assert that the American Medical Association and its State and local …