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

Iris Kesternich, Heiner Schumacher and Joachim Winter ()

Journal of Public Economics, 2015, vol. 131, issue C, 1-11

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 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.

Keywords: Social preferences; Allocation of medical resources; Professional norms (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: A13 C72 C91 I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (69)

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Working Paper: Professional norms and physician behavior: homo oeconomicus or homo hippocraticus? (2014)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:pubeco:v:131:y:2015:i:c:p:1-11

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpubeco.2015.08.009

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