Benjamin Vatter

I am an Assistant Professor of Economics and the Class of 1943 Career Development Assistant Professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management in the Applied Economics group. I received my Ph.D. in Economics from Northwestern University in 2022.

My research centers on questions in industrial organization and public economics, with emphasis on competition and policy design in healthcare markets.

Working Papers

Quality Disclosure and Regulation: Scoring Design in Medicare Advantage

(Conditionally Accepted at Econometrica)

Asymmetric information and market power distort quality provision. Simple scores coordinate consumers on higher quality, marshaling their demand to offset producer market power.

PDF Appendix Supplementary Material SSRN Slides
Quality Disclosure and Regulation: Scoring Design in Medicare Advantage
Vertical Integration and Plan Design in Healthcare Markets

With Jose Ignacio Cuesta and Carlos Noton

Hospital-insurer integration leads to skewed plan generosity, harming hospital competition, increasing prices and premiums, and offsetting the gains from reduced double marginalization

PDF Appendix SSRN
Vertical Integration and Plan Design in Healthcare Markets

Work in Progress

Mergers With Intermediation: The Price Effect of Distant Hospital Mergers

With David Dranove

Paying for Quality: Coordinated Subsidy and Scoring Design in Medicare Advantage

With Sebastian Fleitas

Robust Risk Adjustment

With Aaron Banks, Pietro Tebaldi, and Matthew Zhan

Regulating Charitable Care

With Xuelin Li, and Tong Liu

The Equilibrium Effects of Voluntary Delayed Retirement: Optimality and Adverse Selection.

With Gaston Illanes, Manisha Padi, Bernardo de Moura, and Ursula Schwarzhaupt

Public Goods

Job Market Application Tracker

A simple job application tracker for the Economics Job Market.

Coding Primer: a reference guide

A review of coding practices and excercises for second year Industrial Organization Ph.D. students. Written in collaboration with Gaston Illanes