Physicians' treatment decisions determine the level of health care spending to a large extent. The analysis of physician agency describes how doctors trade off their own and their patients' benefits, with a third party (such as the collective of insured individuals or the taxpayers) bearing the costs. Professional norms are viewed as restraining physicians' self-interest and as introducing altruism towards the patient. We present a controlled experiment that analyzes the impact of professional norms on prospective physicians' trade-offs between her own profits, the patients' benefits, and the payers' expenses for medical care. We find that professional norms derived from the Hippocratic tradition shift weight to the patient in the physician's decisions while decreasing his self-interest and efficiency concerns.Keywords: social preferences, allocation of medical resources, professional norms JEL classification: A13, I19, C72, C91 * We would like to thank seminar audiences at Aarhus University, the Harvard Health Care Policy Center, the Kelly School of Business, and the Universities of Copenhagen, Michigan, and Stirling, as well as participants of the 2014 Workshop on Behavioral and Experimental Health Economics at the University of Oslo for valuable comments and discussions. We would also like to thank Suzan Elshout and the team of programmers at CentERdata Tilburg for implementing the internet experiment; René Cyranek and the whole MELESSA team for supporting the fieldwork; and Hendrik Brackmann for excellent research assistance. We are grateful to Martin Fischer and Matthias Holzer for their help in fielding this study with a sample of Munich medical students. We acknowledge financial support by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through SFB/TR 15.

Traditional beliefs play an important role in many Sub‐Saharan African village societies. These beliefs imply immediate punishment for any breach of the moral code, and the possibility to influence an individual's life by the use of magic. We analyze the economic impact of traditional beliefs on behavior by conducting an experiment with microentrepreneurs in the environs of Ouagadougou (Burkina Faso). The salience of traditional beliefs is randomly varied through semistructured interviews. We find that priming traditional beliefs substantially increases prosocial behavior in the Trust Game. This effect is independent of age, gender, religious affiliation, or wealth.

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We experimentally analyze distributional preferences when a decider chooses the provision of a good that benefits herself or a receiver, and creates costs for a group of payers. The treatment variation is the number of payers. We observe that subjects provide the good even if there are many payers so that the costs of provision exceed the benefits by far. This result holds regardless of whether the provision increases the decider's payoff or not. Intriguingly, it is not only selfish or maximin types who provide the good. Rather, we show that a substantial fraction of subjects are "insensitive to group size": they reveal to care about the payoff of all parties, but attach the same weight to small and large groups so that they ignore large provision costs that are dispersed among many payers. Our results have important consequences for the approval of policies with concentrated benefits and large, dispersed cost, as well as the analysis of ethical behavior, medical decision making, and charity donations.

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