Multimarket Contact in the Hospital Industry

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Schmitt, Matt
• 署名单位: University of California System; University of California Los Angeles
• 刊物名称: AMERICAN ECONOMIC JOURNAL-ECONOMIC POLICY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1945-7731
• DOI: 10.1257/pol.20170001
• 发表日期: 2018
• 页码: 361-387
• 关键词: Bargaining power; COMPETITION; mergers; collusion; systems

摘要

Hospitals in the United States increasingly belong to multihospital systems that operate in numerous geographic markets. A large literature in management and economics suggests that competition between firms may be softened as a result of multimarket contact-i.e., firms competing with one another in multiple markets simultaneously. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in multimarket contact generated by out-of-market consolidation, I find that increases in multimarket contact over the 2000-2010 period led to higher hospital prices. These results suggest that continued hospital consolidation may produce higher prices even if that consolidation only minimally affects within-market concentration.