Hospital competition when patients learn through experience

We study competing hospitals’ incentives for quality provision in a dynamic setting where healthcare is an experience good. In our model, the utility a patient derives from choosing a particular provider depends on a subjective component specific to the match between the patient and the provider, which can only be learned through experience. We find that the experience-good nature of healthcare can either reinforce or dampen the demand responsiveness to quality and the hospitals’ incentives for quality provision, depending on two key factors: the shape of the distribution of match-specific utilities and the cost relationship between quality provision and treatment volume. We establish conditions under which ignoring the experience dimension of healthcare leads to inaccurate assessments of the competitiveness of hospital markets.