Market Concentration in Health Care

Imagine you are in a room with 15 strangers, possibly having coffee or catching up on phone calls before your next session at ANESTHESIOLOGY^® 2021. Each of you has a blue card made of the highest-quality stock paper. I walk into the room and announce that I have 16 orange cards made of the same paper stock. I indicate that I am acting as a broker for an eccentric surgeon who is willing to pay $100 for each pair of cards – one orange and one blue – that I can round up for her. I approach each of you separately to negotiate a price to buy your blue card so I can subsequently sell the pair to the surgeon. What price do you think we negotiate? Based on numerous experiments with a variety of sample sizes and individuals with myriad backgrounds, the transaction described here typically results in...