Do medical doctors respond to economic incentives?

Abstract

We provide a novel intuition for the observation that many brand manufacturers have restricted their retailers' ability to resell brand products online. Our approach builds on models of salience according to which price disparities across distribution channels guide a consumer's attention toward prices and lower her appreciation for quality. Thus, absent vertical restraints, one out of two distortions -a quality or a participation distortion -can arise in equilibrium. The quality distortion occurs if the manufacturer provides either an inefficiently low quality under price salience or an inefficiently high quality in order to prevent price salience. The participation distortion arises as offline sales might be entirely abandoned in order to prevent prices from becoming salient. Both distortions are ruled out if vertical restraints are imposed. As opposed to the current EU legislation that considers a range of vertical restraints as being hardcore restrictions of competition per se, we show that these constraints can be socially desirable if salience effects are taken into account. JEL-Codes: D210, K210, L420.Keywords: salience, online sales, antitrust, vertical restraints, distribution channels. Markus Dertwinkel-KaltUniversity IntroductionThanks to digitalization e-commerce is on the rise. Online sales have been steadily increasing, amounting in 2016 to $395 billion (11.7% of overall sales) in the United States and $1.9 trillion (8.7% of total retail spending) worldwide. 1 Many retailers offer their products both offline in brick-and-mortar stores and online via own online stores or platforms such as Amazon, ebay, Newegg, Alibaba, or Mercado Libre. Online sales offer two main advantages. First, they allow a reduction in retail costs for service and personnel. Second, they reduce shopping time and allow geographical distance to be overcome, both of which may enlarge the customer base. Therefore, online sales should have a positive impact both on a manufacturer's profit and on social welfare.Nevertheless, manufacturers have gone to great lengths to restrain internet sales, often claiming that low internet prices harm their brand's image. Along these lines, "protecting my company's brand image" was mentioned as the "biggest e-commerce-related challenge" in a 2015 survey on 347 brand manufacturers which ranged in size from more than $10 billion in annual sales to less than $100 million. protect a brand's image should be assessed is a key question (Bundeskartellamt, 2013, p. 27).We show that this widespread puzzle can be explained by the psychologically founded contrast effect (e.g., Schkade and Kahneman, 1998; Dunn et al., 2003) whereby consumers focus on that choice dimension (e.g., quality or price) along which available offers differ the most. Accordingly, if a product's price varies across distribution channels, consumers focus more on its price and less on its quality. The relevance of contrast effects for similar purchase decisions has been supported both in the lab (Dertwinkel-Kalt et al., 2017b) ...

Do Financial Incentives Influence GPs' Decisions to Do After‐hours Work? A Discrete Choice Labour Supply Model

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