Quality in the regulated health care sector: How to incentivize it? What patients think it is?

In the UK access to health care is free, but hospitals compete for patients and may decide to improve quality to attract them. However, absent sufficient competitive pressure this improvement may not materialize. In this context where price is not the driver of choice, I would like to exploit the institutional details of this market to estimate both the demand side and the supply side of health care services starting from detailed data on procedures and on quality available for the UK health care sector. Using data on past mergers I could also use the demand estimation model I would develop to compare an ideal “ex-ante” analysis with the “ex-post” effect of a merger in terms of impact on costs and quality. At the same time I would perform counterfactual exercises looking at different types of regulation. Furthermore, I plan to develop a dynamic model to capture investment decisions that cover more than one period and investigate the consequences of having a single efficiency factor across all services in the regulatory framework.