Physician behavior under prospective payment schemes - Evidence from artefactual field and lab experiments
Special Issue: Incentive and Market Perspectives in Health Care
Recent experimental studies analyze the behavior of physicians towards patients and find that physicians care for their own profit as well as patient benefit. In this paper, we extend the experimental analysis of the physician decision problem by adding a third party which represents the health insurance that finances medical service provision under a prospective payment scheme. Our results show that physicians take into account the payoffs of the third party, which can lead to underprovision of medical care. We conduct a laboratory experiment in neutral as well as in medical framing using students and medical doctors as subjects. Subjects in the medically framed experiments behave weakly and are more patient orientated in contrast to neutral framing. A sample of medical doctors exhibits comparable behavior to students with medical framing.
Reif, S., L. Hafner und M. Seebauer (2020), Physician behavior under prospective payment schemes - Evidence from artefactual field and lab experiments: Special Issue: Incentive and Market Perspectives in Health Care. International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health , 17, 15, 5540