Experimental evidence of physician social preferences

Jing Li, Lawrence P. Casalino, Raymond Fisman, Shachar Kariv and Daniel Markovits
Additional contact information
Jing Li: a The Comparative Health Outcomes, Policy, and Economics (CHOICE) Institute, Department of Pharmacy, University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195
Lawrence P. Casalino: b Department of Population Health Sciences, Joan & Sanford I. Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY 10065
Shachar Kariv: d Department of Economics, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
Daniel Markovits: e Yale Law School, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06511

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 2022, vol. 119, issue 28, e2112726119

Abstract: Physicians routinely face trade-offs among their own interests, the interests of their patients, and society’s interest in preserving medical resources. To manage these trade-offs, society relies on both traditional professional ethics and bureaucratic monitoring and control. Our results—that physicians are twice as likely to be altruistic as all other samples but indistinguishable from the general population in terms of equality–efficiency orientation—suggest that professional norms can meaningfully contribute to physicians putting patients first and highlight the importance of nurturing these norms of physician professionalism. However, our findings also suggest that policymakers may not rely on physician professionalism to ensure an efficient allocation of medical resources.

Keywords: physicians; social preferences; altruism; equality; efficiency (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (10)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.pnas.org/content/119/28/e2112726119.full (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:nas:journl:v:119:y:2022:p:e2112726119

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
Bibliographic data for series maintained by PNAS Product Team ().