Efeitos de grupos na demanda por consultas odontológicas

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to identify the existence of group effects, known as peer effects, at the demand for dental appointments in collective contracts that are exclusively dental health plans. This paper compares the number of dental appointments of each person with the amount of dental appointments in the group, despising the history appoint of the analyzed individual. In order to test empirically if the group effect is important, a model of traditional counting was used, with the introduction of the variable that indicates of group effect, particularly, the model of binomial negative counting for panel with random effects, embracing both the effect of over-dispersion and the time dependence of the use for the same person. The companies were divided into five groups according to their size, as follows: 2 to 20, 21 to 50, 51 to 100, 101 to 200 and more than 200 beneficiaries. The results showed that the group effects increased successively according to the size of the company, in which companies with more than 200 beneficiaries were the ones most affected.