Please use this identifier to cite or link to this item: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/94069 
Year of Publication: 
2014
Series/Report no.: 
SFB/TR 15 Discussion Paper No. 456
Publisher: 
Sonderforschungsbereich/Transregio 15 - Governance and the Efficiency of Economic Systems (GESY), München
Abstract: 
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.
Subjects: 
social preferences
allocation of medical resources
professional norms
JEL: 
A13
I19
C72
C91
Persistent Identifier of the first edition: 
Document Type: 
Working Paper

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