Measuring Quality Effects in Equilibrium

Unlike demand studies in other industries, models of provider demand in health care often must omit a price, or any other factor that equilibrates the market such as a waiting time. Estimates of the consumer response to quality may consequently be attenuated, if the limited capacity of individual physicians prevents some consumers from obtaining higher quality. We propose a tractable method to address this problem by adding a congestion effect to standard discrete-choice models. We show analytically how this can improve forecasts of the consumer response to quality. We then apply this method to the market for heart surgery, and find that the attenuation bias in estimated quality effects can be important empirically.