The health queuing game

Abstract

This paper studies agent-to-agent games in competition for a free public resource. The resource is not evidently scarce, scarcity may, however, be the equilibrium outcome. The agents' attributes may di er as well as quality parameters between di erent public resources. The examples are taken from the health sector. Based on simple two-player simultaneous games of complete information, results regarding agent equilibrium quality choices are derived. Most notably, Nash equilibria of the type: very ill patients choose low quality hospitals (denoted adverse patient allocation in the paper) are demonstrated. Furthermore, it is argued that a situation characterized by patients with relatively mild diseases but large patient variability (big di erences between patients regarding the given disease) and a health system with medium competition are prime candidates for Nash equilibria characterized by such Adverse patient allocation e ects.