Browsing by Subject "Incentives"

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    Essays in Industrial Organization and Health Economics
    (2019-07) Falcettoni, Elena
    This dissertation studies how physicians respond to incentives in terms of: their treatment choice, their geographical distribution in the United States, and their effect on health outcomes. To address this, I exploit micro-data from Medicare at a physician-procedure level. I then supplement this dataset with novel, granular data collected from physicians’ directories that follow physicians from their choice of medical school onward. Chapter 1 introduces the topic and presents an overview of the questions analyzed and results obtained throughout the dissertation. Chapter 2 analyzes primary care physicians’ response to fee-for-service pricing along the urban/rural divide. In particular, it first documents that primary care physicians provide more (remunerative) specialty procedures in less urban areas, where specialists are fewer; secondly, it analyzes how primary care physicians switch to the more remunerative procedures when their fees are increased. Chapter 3 develops a model of physicians’ location choices and uses it to explore the impact of policy changes (loan forgiveness and salary incentives) on the geographical distribution of physicians. Chapter 4 provides evidence on the impact of the physician workforce on health outcomes by exploiting the policy-set fees and the micro-data availability.
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    Essays on the application of multitasking in marketing channels.
    (2010-06) Banerjee, Ranjan
    Firms routinely engage channel partners to create and deliver valued products and services to end customers. There are a large variety of such partners performing several different tasks across the stages of the buying process, including prospecting for customers, making product recommendations, educating customers, and closing the sale. Managing multiple delegated tasks poses a significant challenge because efforts on individual tasks are often not directly observable. Multi-tasking (or the presence of multiple tasks) is ubiquitous in marketing channels. However, there is a dearth of empirical literature which sheds light on problems of task allocation and contract design in situations where firms desire to have multiple tasks performed through channel members. In this dissertation, we attempt to address this gap through three essays which provide theoretical and empirical insights into issues of task allocation, contract design and the relationship between contract design and channel performance in multi-task settings. In essays 1 and 2, we consider a situation where a firm wishes to have multiple tasks performed through a number of retail stores which differ in terms of locational characteristics. We build and estimate a model which is geared to this setting, and counterfactually compute the performance implications of alternative channel structures. Our results suggest a performance rationale for the deployment of multiple channels, and validate theoretical predictions about the dampening of incentive effectiveness in the presence of a non-measured second task. In essay 3 we consider a two stage process where telecallers generate leads which are then passed on to salespeople for conversion. We use a unique combination of a structural model and a field intervention to estimate relevant parameters for both salespeople and telecallers. Our analysis provides a generalizable methodology for incentive design in these settings and suggests that the nature of interdependence between tasks crucially affects incentive loading between intermediate and final outputs.