Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

We assess the performance of three hospital merger simulation methods by means of a Monte Carlo experiment. We fi#12;rst specify a rich theoretical model of hospital markets and use it to generate "true" price eff#11;ects of a large number of hospital mergers. We then use the theoretical model to generate the data that would be available in a real-world prospective merger analysis and apply the merger simulation methods to those data. Finally, we compare the predictions of the merger simulation methods to the true price eff#11;ects. While there is some heterogeneity in performance, all three simulation methods perform reasonably well.