Kane Sweeney Ph.D. Candidate

Managerial Economics & Strategy Ph.D. Northwestern University, 2013 (expected) B.S. Washington University in St. Louis, 2003

 

I look forward to joining eBay Research Labs this summer..

Kane Sweeney is a doctoral candidate in Managerial Economics & Strategy at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Prior to joining Kellogg, Kane worked at Bank of America's Investment Bank in the Quantitative Finance division as well as at RCF Economic Consulting. At Kellogg, he teaches Health Economics at the MBA level, and his current research applies the tools of industrial organization and market design to study health care and multi-sided matching networks.

Curriculum Vitae

Research Interests: Industrial Organization, Market Design, Health Economics

Advisors:

Prof. Rakesh Vohra
Prof. David Dranove
Prof. Michael Whinston

 

Current Project:

Health Insurance Pre-Exchanges: A Market Design Approach to Insurer-Provider Network Formation

• Part I: Theory (***Job Market Paper***)

• Part II: Empirics (coming soon)

In this two-part project, I propose a centralized marketplace, a pre-exchange, for health insurer-provider network formation and examine its welfare impact both theoretically and empirically.

Current network formation is highly decentralized and contracting is bilateral within each insurer-provider pair. The key innovation of the pre-exchange is the introduction of explicitly multilateral contracting. In particular, providers set prices that depend both on the identity of the insurer as well as the identities of the other rival hospitals in the insurer's network. I refer to this as network-specific pricing.

In Part I, I construct a theoretical model to show how network-specific pricing enhances efficiency and lowers health care prices. The key theoretical insight is that bilateral contracting produces a strong pricing complementarity among the providers. Network-specific pricing, by design, unwinds this complementarity and results in substantially lower "cost" of healthcare.

In Part II, I import the qualitative theoretical results from Part I to estimate the quantitative impact of pre-exchanges in an empirically relevant setting, the Massachusetts health care market.

 

Forthcoming Papers:

Bayes-Nash Equilibria of the Generalized Second Price Auction (with Renato Gomes - Games and Economic Behavior)

 

Work in Progress:

Bank It or Lose It: The Market for Cord Blood (with B. Pablo Montagnes)

"Cost"-Effective Health Care and Strategic Treatment Pricing