 Implicit Discount Rates of Vascular Surgeons in the Management of Abdominal Aortic AneurysmsUlrika Enemark, Carl H. Lyttkens, Thomas Troëng, Henrik Weibull and Jonas Ranstam Medical Decision Making, 1998, vol. 18, issue 2, 168-177 Abstract: A growing empirical literature has investigated attitudes towards discounting of health benefits with regard to social choices of life-saving and health-improving measures and individuals' time preferences for the management of their own health. In this study, the authors elicited the time preferences of vascular surgeons in the context of management of small abdominal aortic aneurysms, for which the choice between early elective surgery and watchful waiting is not straightforward. They interviewed 25 of a random sample of 30 Swedish vascular surgeons. Considerable variation in the time preferences was found in the choices between watchful waiting and surgical intervention among the otherwise very homogeneous group of surgeons. The discount rates derived ranged from 5.3% to 19.4%. The median discount rate (10.4%) is similar to those usually reported for social choices concerning life-saving measures. The surgeons who were employed in university hospitals had higher discount rates than did their colleagues in county and district hospitals. Keywords: physician time-preference rate; decision making; vascular disease (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:sae:medema:v:18:y:1998:i:2:p:168-177 DOI: 10.1177/0272989X9801800206 Access Statistics for this article More articles in Medical Decision Making |
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