Imperfect Information in Health Care Markets

• The exercise session on November 11 is canceled.

• Exam dates are Feb 4, 11:00 (100 Hörsaal II 100/U1/HS II) and March 19, 16:00 (100 Aula 2 100/01/Aula 2). Registration is open on KLIPS. We will try to grade the exams of the first date before the registration deadline of the second but we cannot guarantee that we will manage (we managed in previous years).

• Note that there will be an exercise session on October 7 even though this is before the first lecture. This exercise session is dedicated to repeating some mathematical concepts used in this course.

Several students asked for references for the prerequisites in terms of mathematics, statistics and microeconomics. For all of these areas there are literally hundreds of books titled "(Intermediate/Introductory) Microeconomics" or "Mathematics/Statistics for Business/Economics" and all of them cover more or less the same material. For concreteness, I name "Intermediate Microeconomis" ("Grundzüge der Mikroökonomik") by Hal Varian where chapters 1-6 are assumed to be known and chapter 12 is what we cover in the second lecture. Chapters 14-16 might be interesting background reading as well. For mathematics, "Essential Mathematics for Economic Analysis" by Sysdsæter, Hammond, Strøm and Carvajal may be useful. German speaking students may also be interested in Peter Dörsam's book "Mathematik anschaulich dargestellt für Studierende der Wirtschaftswissenschaften". I am not familiar with statistics books but everything targeted at first semester business/economics students should be fine. Essentially, you have to know what a distribution is, how to compute an expected value and a variance, what a hypothesis test is and how an OLS regression works. While it skips some of the basic statistics, the first 2 chapters in "Mastering Metrics: The path from cause to effect" by Angrist and Pischke might be used as an application oriented introduction to empirical work. Throughout the course we assume that your high school math knowledge is working and we have no time to repeat this material, e.g. make sure you can solve linear and quadratic equations, take derivatives, know their interpretation, and integrate simple functions before week 1 of the semester.

If you want to take a less broad approach in catching up, the internet offers a variety of materials and formats (lecture notes, video tutorials on major online video platforms, interactive websites) that can be found with the usual search engines. For example, Wikipedia provides short definitions and explanations on all above mentioned topics (and often links to more in depth material).

Please note that I do not use ILIAS because (i) I did not agree with certain usage conditions concerning tracking and data utilization and (ii) I believe that the material I create should be publicly available as it is essentially funded by public money. The material below is likely to get updated over the course of the term.

Lecture slides and exercises are posted/updated here over the course of the term. You can find the source code creating the slides as Emacs org-mode files (".org") here.

• The exercises are available as pdf and as org file. Exercises for the first week are available here.
• Slides
  • intro slides
  • demand for insurance slides
  • (adverse) selection slides, numerical example no single crossing
  • moral hazard slides
  • physician-patient slides
• Screencasts
  • derivation Rothschild-Stiglitz equilibrium
  • how to get descriptive statistics and do regressions in LibreOffice Calc
  • bonus screencast on endogenous treatment choice

• Data sets and instructions for case studies:
  • exercises (as pdf) and datasets for the empirical lectures are here available for download

• An old exam is available.
• material created by other people:
  • a video on (adverse) selection
• Notes
  • old notes concerning the lecture
  • notes (book project – not all parts are relevant!; password announced in lecture)

This is a plan and as every good plan it may be adjusted if necessary.