Hospital ‘report cards’ policies involve governments publishing information about hospital quality. Such policies often aim to improve hospital quality by stimulating competition between hospitals. Previous empirical literature lacks a comprehensive theoretical framework for analysing the effects of report cards. We model a report card policy in a market where two hospitals compete for patients on quality under regulated prices. The report card policy improves the accuracy of the quality signal observed by patients. Hospitals may improve their published quality scores by costly quality improvement or by selecting healthier patients to treat. We show that increasing information through report cards always increases quality and only sometimes induces selection. Report cards are more likely to increase patient welfare when quality scores are well risk-adjusted, where the cost of selecting patients is high, and the cost of increasing quality is low.

医院“成绩单”政策涉及政府发布有关医院质量的信息。此类政策通常旨在通过刺激医院之间的竞争来提高医院质量。以往的实证文献缺乏一个全面的理论框架来分析成绩单的影响。我们在一个市场中模拟报告卡政策，在该市场中，两家医院在受监管的价格下以质量竞争患者。报告卡策略提高了患者观察到的质量信号的准确性。医院可能会通过代价高昂的质量改进或选择更健康的患者进行治疗来提高其公布的质量分数。我们表明，通过报告卡增加信息总是会提高质量，只是有时会导致选择。