Abstract
Online health care marketplaces have emerged with the adoption of telemedicine during the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite its readily available information on price and quality, we document substantial price dispersion for telemedicine services in China’s internet health market. We further examine the sources of such price variation: observable characteristics of physicians, hospitals, and local markets explain slightly over half of this variation. The un-explained portion is greater for physician specialties where search frictions are likely larger.
Resources
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Xiang, Jia, Terence C. Cheng, Hongqiao Fu, Winnie Yip. 2023. “Price dispersion in an online health marketplace: Evidence from telemedicine services in China.” Economics Letters 2024(234):111435. doi:10.1016/j.econlet.2023.111435