Risk attitudes in medical decisions for others: An experimental approach

Alejandro Arrieta, Ariadna García‐Prado, Paula González and José Luis Pinto‐Prades
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Jose-Luis Pinto-Prades

Health Economics, 2017, vol. 26, issue S3, 97-113

Abstract: ABSTRACT The aim of this paper is to investigate how risk attitudes in medical decisions for others vary across health contexts. A lab experiment was designed to elicit the risk attitudes of 257 medical and nonmedical students by assigning them the role of a physician who must decide between treatments for patients. An interval regression model was used to estimate individual coefficients of relative risk aversion, and an estimation model was used to test for the effect of type of medical decision and experimental design characteristics on elicited risk aversion. We find that (a) risk attitudes vary across different health contexts, but risk aversion prevails in all of them; (b) students enrolled in health‐related degrees show a higher degree of risk aversion; and (c) real rewards for third parties (patients) make subjects less risk‐averse. The results underline the importance of accounting for attitudes towards risk in medical decision making.

Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1002/hec.3628

Related works:
Working Paper: Risk Attitudes in Medical Decisions for Others: An Experimental Approach (2016)
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:wly:hlthec:v:26:y:2017:i:s3:p:97-113

Access Statistics for this article

Health Economics is currently edited by Alan Maynard, John Hutton and Andrew Jones

More articles in Health Economics from John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().