Research

Research at CINCH is divided into several subprojects, which are presented in more detail in the following sections.

The project Empirical Health Care Management, led by Jun. Prof. Dr. Katharina Blankart (née Fischer), explores the effects of regulation on actors in the health care market, and the role of innovation. One of its main interests is in the effects of Germany’s Act on the Reform of the Market for Medicinal Products (AMNOG) on benefit assessment of new pharmaceuticals in relation to various aspects. In collaboration with the Hamburg Center for Health Economics as part of a DFG-funded project, the researchers developed an innovative database containing the decisions of the Federal Joint Committee under AMNOG.

Another subproject, Demand and Competition in Long-Term Care, led by Jun. Prof. Dr. Annika Herr, created a panel dataset containing quality information on all German nursing homes for use in research on topics relating to long-term care in Germany. Long-term care is also an important aspect of the Long-Term Care in Europe project, which is funded by the European Investment Bank. Working with the RWI and with Prof. Dr. Martin Karlsson as Principal Investigator, the project seeks to gain new insights into affordable, fair and efficient long-term care.

Many of the experiments of the Pay for Performance (Prof. Dr. Jeanette Brosig-Koch) and Health Care Markets (Jun. Prof. Dr. Nadja Karies- Schwarz) project groups are conducted in the Essen Laboratory for Experimental Economics (elfe). The laboratory is one of the world’s best equipped experimental facilities for research into economic interaction and communication. A special feature of the CINCH research is that the experiments are conducted with students as well as real physicians in the field to increase external validity. The first online experiments in this area were conducted in 2016 with a representative sample of physicians. In a current project of the Health Care Markets group, the researchers are exploring the influence of dynamic incentives in health insurance plans on consumer spending behaviour. The project is interested in particular in whether individuals anticipate the effects on the price of future health care services of current expenditures that influence the insurance deductible, and whether they take them into their decisions today. In the lab, the subjects are confronted with a series of decision-making situations and different induced medical conditions and must decide for or against a treatment.

The main interest of Prof. Dr. Jürgen Wasem and the team of the Risk Adjustment in Health Insurance project group is in identifying optimal risk factors for the risk adjustment scheme introduced in Germany. The researchers recently concluded the central research projects of the first funding period.

One of the projects of the Empirical Analysis in Health Care Markets group led by Jun. Prof. Dr. Daniel Avdic is described in the section below.