Economics

I would like my doctoral research to bring together ideas and techniques of applied game theory, behavioural economics and public economics in order to improve healthcare provision. Specifically, I would be interested in applying recent advancements in the theory of mechanism design (i.e. the study of how resources can be allocated to those who need them most as efficiently as possible) to the case of the UK health and social care system. There are particular
difficulties with designing efficient mechanisms in the case of healthcare because of problems of asymmetric information (people know more about their health than healthcare providers before contracting) and moral hazard (when people have health insurance, they are more willing to take risks as they know they are covered) which do not arise in other fields yet in the case of healthcare mean that a healthcare system founded on competitive market of healthcare
providers seeking to make profit is unlikely to succeed. Despite this, it is not clear what the best alternative to a competitive market is. This problem is a central problem in public economics, i.e. the economic study of efficient government policy, but I aim to come to useful new results by bringing fresh insights from other areas of economics. For instance, I would use the methods of behavioural economics to model things like people's willingness to lie on medical forms and how concern for the viability of a health system as a whole affects action, going beyond the simple prescriptions of basic public economic theory in this area. Also, I plan on approaching this problem using the ideas of applied game theory - building, for example, on the recent Nobel Prize-winning work of Al Roth of using abstract game theoretic notions of mechanism design for non-traded goods to design systems to help incompatible patient-donor pairs find the
compatible kidneys they need for life-saving transplantation. Using these methods, I would hope to produce a piece of research with direct policy relevance to how best the NHS should be structured in order to remain viable - for instance, considering whether the system can be designed so as to incentivise people not to engage in behaviour like heavy alcohol consumption which might place an undue pressure on the NHS. As such, I hope that my research would be able to save money for the NHS, and thus save lives