 Non-life-threatening ailments and rational patience when expected treatment outcomes are continuously improvingKristian Bolin and Michael Caputo Journal of Health Economics, 2021, vol. 79, issue C Abstract: The time at which a rational patient chooses to undergo an elective medical procedure for a non-life-threatening ailment is contemplated. The resulting model is purposely uncomplicated but general, and accounts for several basic factors that might affect such a decision. One such factor is that a patient cannot know with certainty the degree to which the medical procedure will be successful. Even so, patients have information about the expected outcome of the procedure and its risk, and about how the expected outcome and risk are affected by medical technological progress and surgeon experience. The effect of changes in exogenous variables on the timing of the medical procedure and on patient expected lifetime utility are investigated. It is shown that risk averse and prudent patients behave in an unambiguous manner in response to changes in all of the exogenous variables. Keywords: Health behavior; Optimal timing; Medical decisions (search for similar items in EconPapers) Downloads: (external link) Related works: Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jhecon:v:79:y:2021:i:c:s0167629621000801 DOI: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2021.102495 Access Statistics for this article Journal of Health Economics is currently edited by J. P. Newhouse, A. J. Culyer, R. Frank, K. Claxton and T. McGuire More articles in Journal of Health Economics from Elsevier |
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