Which patients do I treat? An experimental study with economists and physicians

Abstract

This experiment investigates decisions made by prospective economists and physicians in an allocation problem which can be framed either medically or neutrally. The potential recipients differ with respect to their minimum needs as well as to how much they benefit from a treatment. We classify the allocators as either 'selfish', 'Rawlsian', or 'maximizing the number of recipients'. Economists tend to maximize their own payoff, whereas the physicians' choices are more in line with maximizing the number of recipients and with Rawlsianism. Regarding the framing, we observe that professional norms surface more clearly in familiar settings. Finally, we scrutinize how the probability of being served and the allocated quantity depend on a recipient's characteristics as well as on the allocator type.JEL Classification: A13, I19, C91, C72

Medical Insurance and Free Choice of Physician Shape Patient Overtreatment: A Laboratory Experiment

“…Assuming that there is no interaction effect between the labelling of actors in the instructions and the analyzed institutions, framing should only play a minor role. This assumption is supported by the fact that none of the papers investigating the impact of a medical vs. a non-medical framing (see for instance Ahlert et al 2012, Boehm et al 2015) finds a notable interaction effect between the framing and other treatment variations.…”

The Effects of Introducing Mixed Payment Systems for Physicians Experimental Evidence

“…For example, Ahlert et al (2012) find behavioral differences between students of medicine and economics. Hennig-Schmidt and Wiesen (2014) show more other-regrading behavior of medical students compared to non-medical students.…”

“…Laboratory experiments analyze, for example, health insurance choices (Schram and Sonnemans, 2011), health care financing (e.g., Buckley et al, 2012), the allocation of medical resources (e.g., Ahlert et al, 2012), the salience of the Hippocratic Oath (Kesternich et al, 2014), and other-regarding behavior and motivations (Hennig-Schmidt and Wiesen, 2014).…”

How do Non-Monetary Performance Incentives for Physicians Affect the Quality of Medical Care? - A Laboratory Experiment

“…Comparing decision behavior between these groups allows us to clarify whether prospective physicians -who have perhaps selected themselves into medical education based on specific social preferences, or are influenced by medical professional norms in the course of their training, or both -react differently to reputation-based performance incentives. Ahlert et al (2012), for example, find that behavior in situations framed as medical treatment decisions (rather than neutral decisions) is impacted by the professional norms of medicine or economics adopted by their subjects. However, other experiments carried out at the Essen Laboratory for Experimental Economics involving different types of health-related decisions have not confirmed this type of professional effect (e.g.…”