Professional norms and physician behavior: Homo oeconomicus or homo hippocraticus?

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Kesternich, Iris; Schumacher, Heiner; Winter, Joachim
• 署名单位: KU Leuven; University of Munich
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF PUBLIC ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0047-2727
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.08.009
• 发表日期: 2015
• 页码: 1-11
• 关键词: social preferences; Allocation of medical resources; Professional norms

摘要

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 their own profits, the patients' benefits, and the payers' expenses for medical care. Our data support the notion that professional norms derived from the Hippocratic tradition shift weight to the patient in physicians' decisions while decreasing their self-interest and efficiency concerns. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.