Quality and hospital choice for cataract treatments: the winner takes most

At the aggregate-level we find that, a one-point quality increase, on a scale of one to a hundred, would raise patient volume for the average hospital by 2-4%. This effect is mainly due to the performance of the top performing hospital. This effect halves after excluding this hospital from the dataset. Also at the individual-level, we find, all else being equal, that patients are willing to travel an additional 11km or more for the top performing as opposed to other hospitals. Our results suggest that the impact of quality on patient volume and willingness to travel is non-linear. Only the top performing hospital is able to attract significantly more patients.