Browsing by Subject "Vertrag"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
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    Contract design and insurance fraud : an experimental investigation
    (2010) Schiller, Jörg; Lammers, Frauke
    This paper investigates the impact of insurance contract design on the behavior of filing fraudulent claims in an experimental setup. We test how fraud behavior varies for insurance contracts with full coverage, a straight deductible or variable premiums (bonus-malus contract). In our experiment, filing fraudulent claims is a dominant strategy for selfish participants, with no psychological costs of committing fraud. While some people always commit fraud, a substantial share of people only occasionally or never defraud. In addition, we find that deductible contracts may be perceived as unfair and thus increase the extent of claim build-up compared to full coverage contracts. In contrast, bonus-malus contracts with variable insurance premiums significantly reduce the filing of fictitious claims compared to both full coverage and deductible contracts. This reduction cannot be explained by monetary incentives. Our results indicate that contract design significantly affects psychological costs and, consequently, the extent of fraudulent behavior of policyholders.
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    Prices, governance challenges and contracts in scaling of biofortification
    (2023) Richard, Alioma; Zeller, Manfred
    Micronutrient deficiency remains a global health challenge, especially in developing countries, despite government and development partners programs, numerous policies, and interventions to decrease its prevalence. Micronutrient deficiency adversely affects pregnancy, child growth, disease susceptibility, and cognitive development. Populations suffer from deficiencies due to low intake of micronutrients such as iron, zinc, vitamin A and iodine in their diets. Therefore, many interventions and policies have aimed at increasing the intake of micronutrients by the target populations. Some of these interventions include fortification, that is to increase the micronutrient content of foods or condiments, biofortification which entails breeding staple crops with higher content of bioavailable micronutrients, supplementation, and dietary diversity. These interventions face numerous challenges to scale to larger populations mainly because of behavioural attributes, prices, and governance challenges. The importance of prices stretches from academia to policymakers because of its substantial impact on the consumption behaviour of poor households affecting micronutrient intake. Existing literature on prices concentrated on the cost of micronutrient-dense foods compared to starchy staple foods and the price change for different food items. The second challenge in the scaling of interventions is governance challenges. Governance challenges exist in formal and informal institutions affecting the value chain for biofortified seeds or foods. These challenges jeopardize positive development outcomes and may as well pose significant obstacles to scaling the use of biofortified seed and food. Lastly, there has been a growing focus on the involvement of aggregators, processors, and retailers in the development of food value chains in low-income countries, yet the role of supply contracts is unknown. The objectives of this thesis are threefold: 1) to estimate the long-term trends in prices and volatility of micronutrient-dense food as opposed to starchy staple food and derive hypotheses for factors that might have contributed to the observed divergence in the past long-term growth of prices of micronutrient-dense versus starchy food 2) to identify the governance challenges facing farmers, seed multipliers, aggregators, processors, and retailers as one of the scaling pathways and empirically test one pathway to address the governance challenge in Uganda and 3) to determine the distribution and performance of aggregators, retailers, and processors in Nigerias vitamin A food value chain. This cumulative thesis has three papers. The first paper seeks to answer as main question: “Do prices of micronutrient-dense food commodities grow faster than prices of starchy staple food items”. The second paper poses the following as its main question: “What are the governance challenges in scaling biofortified crops”. The third paper addresses the question of which factors determine the distribution and performance of aggregators, processors, and retailers in the development of value chains for staple food crops. In the first paper, we used the autoregressive and panel autoregressive distributed lag models to analyze the trends in relative prices and the effects of income growth. The data set was price data for micronutrient and calorie-dense foods from FAO STAT-GIEWS, IMF, and the World Bank. The results showed that micronutrient-dense food prices in real terms grew on average by 0.03% per month more than starchy staple food prices, with the expectation of a 12% growth gap in the next 30 years. The volatility of micronutrient-dense food items exceeds starchy staple foods in most domestic markets. Also, the prices of micronutrient-dense foods were more volatile in international markets than in most developing countries. Income growth in developing countries is hypothesized to be one of the factors that contributed to the faster growth in demand for and, therefore, prices of micronutrient-dense food commodities. Other factors, such as the growth in the production of staple foods may have caused price trends to persist. After having presented evidence that prices of micronutrient-dense foods have grown faster in the past 30 years, and if this trend continues, interventions for scaling biofortification, among others, will gain importance for eradicating hidden hunger. In the second paper, we provide insights into the governance challenges of biofortification in Uganda. This paper aims to identify the governance challenges facing farmers, seed multipliers, aggregators, processors, and retailers as one of the scaling pathways and empirically test one pathway to address the governance challenge. This pathway was information provision through training. We used a Process Net-Map to elicit information from respondents regarding processes, actors, and challenges in the food value chain of biofortified crops. The Process Net-Map involves the identification of actors, their roles, their influence on the scaling of biofortification and challenges in the processes. The field lab experiment was used to collect data on the effect of information provision on the identification of iron beans. We analysed the data from field lab experiments through a correlated random effects model. The results demonstrate that vine multipliers face challenges in the supply of vines, and households face a trade-off between allocating land for orange-fleshed potatoes and other varieties. In addition, the value chain actors adulterate iron beans while consumers are unwilling to pay a premium for orange-fleshed sweet potato roots and iron bean grains. These challenges may result from information asymmetry, merit goods, collective action, and free riding. Though information provision can improve the identification of iron beans, its effect was insignificant as from the field lab experiments. Increasing access to biofortified seed through subsidies would increase the production of biofortified crops that would saturate the markets. Creating awareness of the importance of nutritious products would enable consumers to pay for biofortified seeds and food. The third paper provides evidence on factors determining the distribution and performance of aggregators, retailers, and processors in Nigerias vitamin A food value chain. We used data collected by HarvestPlus to assess the outcome indicators, including throughput, sales, prices, variable costs and contracts for vitamin A cassava and maize. We used the spatial distributed lag model to determine factors that affect the distribution of aggregators, retailers and processors and the correlated random effects model to assess the role of contracts on their performance. We find that infrastructural and supply variables do not influence the location of aggregators, retailers, and processors. Out of the demand variables (population density, ownership of livestock and literacy rates, price of Garri-cassava flour), only the price of Garri and livestock ownership influenced the location of aggregators, retailers, and processors. Contracts seem to reduce the cost per kilogram for aggregators while insufficiently affecting the costs of retailers and processors. Contracts are also associated with improving the profits of retailers and aggregators. The main policy recommendations emanating from the findings of this thesis are: 1) governments need to adopt policies that enhance nutrition-sensitive interventions such as supplementation, fortification, dietary diversity, and biofortification 2) employ subsidies to increase the production of biofortified crops while creating awareness on the importance of nutritious products in the scaling of biofortified crops and 3) create enabling environments so that aggregators, retailers and processors can engage in contracts with farmers.
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    Selektivverträge in der medizinischen Versorgung
    (2017) Arnegger, Silke; Ernst, Christian
    In the past fifteen years, Germany has introduced several types of medical care and cooperation opportunities between actors in the healthcare market. The gatekeeper model known as Hausarztzentrierte Versorgung (HZV) is a primary physician model and is an example of selective or individual contracting that is now possible between physicians in private practice and health insurance companies. It is also an example of new policy instruments intended to increase competition in the healthcare system (e.g. between insurance companies, amongst physicians in private practice). Increased competition should lead to improvements in the quality of patient care and economic efficiencies in the provision of that care. The latter is an especially important goal in light of the fact that there are a growing number of patients with chronic diseases. Selective medical care contracts like the HZV are situated at this pivot point. Going forward, German health insurance companies and other healthcare market actors – in particular, physicians in private practice – are allowed to enter into individual contracts for the provision of medical care to a group of patients. For this purpose, physicians specializing in a particular field mandate their professional associations to negotiate contracts. Thereafter physicians who want to participate in these contracts can offer the applicable provisions to their patients. Previously, all insurance companies and all registered doctors in private practice were required to enter into collective agreements. Contracts like the HZV mean it should now be possible to study the individual patient care models of different health insurance companies and offer medical care that is better tailored to patients. Additionally, these contracts should encourage communication amongst different actors in the healthcare system and incentivize their behaviour to generate efficiencies. This empirical study aims to explain whether the HZV, namely the selective contracts for primary care physicians in the state of Baden-Württemberg, contain the right incentives for participating doctors (agents) to produce efficient results for the insurance companies with which they have contracted (principals). Data on the quality and efficiency of care provided under these contracts is compared to data on their financial impact on participating doctors. New Institutional Economics inform the theoretical framework used in this study. Its theories of social contract, especially agency, and transaction costs play a central role in interpreting and analysing the data collected. Many studies of selective contracting in the field of healthcare economics focus on legal issues arising from actual and proposed changes to the law. By providing an empirical healthcare oriented economic account of such contracts for primary care physicians in Germany, this study supplements that literature with data and analysis that has been lacking on this important development.