To report or not to report: Applying game theory to nursing error reporting

Alex Barrachina () and Víctor González-Chordá ()
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Alex Barrachina: LEE and Department of Economics, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain
Víctor González-Chordá: Nursing Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain

No 2016/14, Working Papers from Economics Department, Universitat Jaume I, Castellón (Spain)

Abstract: The interaction between nurses and their managers is a very important factor in nurses’ error reporting behaviour, which is crucial to improve patient safety in health care organisations. However, little theoretical work has been undertaken to analyse this interaction. This paper attempts to take a modest step forward in closing this gap in the health economics literature by considering a principal-agent model in which the principal (the nurse manager) asks the agent (the nurse) to perform a task with a certain patient. If the nurse makes a mistake while treating the patient, she has to decide whether to report it to the manager, taking into account that the manager can observe whether the patient suffered an accident. Considering four leadership styles for the manager and four styles of error reporting for the nurse, the paper concludes that a leadership style very close to the transformational one is, in general, the best one for receiving error notifications from nurses, which is coherent with the evidence provided by the nursing management literature.

Keywords: Nurse error reporting; Patient safety; Asymmetric information; Nurse-manager interaction– Nurse leadership style (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C72 D82 I12 M12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 27 pages
Date: 2016
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth, nep-hea and nep-hpe
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:jau:wpaper:2016/14

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