Recent advances in healthcare information technologies allow healthcare providers to more accurately track patient characteristics and predict the future treatment costs of previously treated patients, which increases the scope for providers to quality discriminate across different patient types. We theoretically analyze the potential implications of such quality discrimination in a duopoly setting with profit-maximizing hospitals, fixed prices, and heterogeneous patients. Our analysis shows that the ability to quality discriminate tends to intensify competition and lead to higher quality provision, which benefits patients but makes the hospitals less profitable. Nevertheless, the effect on social welfare is a priori ambiguous, since quality discrimination also leads to an inefficient allocation of patients across hospitals.

中文翻译：

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医疗保健市场的质量歧视

医疗保健信息技术的最新进展使医疗保健提供者能够更准确地跟踪患者特征并预测先前治疗过的患者的未来治疗成本，这增加了提供者对不同患者类型进行质量区分的范围。我们从理论上分析了在利润最大化医院、固定价格和异质患者的双头垄断环境中这种质量歧视的潜在影响。我们的分析表明，质量歧视的能力往往会加剧竞争并带来更高质量的服务，这对患者有利，但会降低医院的利润。然而，这对社会福利的影响是先验模糊的，因为质量歧视也会导致医院之间患者的低效分配。