Disclosing physician ratings: performance effects and the difficulty of altering rating consensus

Henry Eyring

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: I examine effects of a health care system's policy to publicly disclose patient ratings of its physicians. I find evidence that this policy leads to performance improvement by the disclosed, subjective ratings and also by undisclosed, objective measures of quality. These effects are consistent with multitasking theory, in that physicians respond to the disclosure by providing more of a shared input—time with patients—that benefits performance by ratings and underlying quality. I also find, as predicted by information cascade theory, that the ratings become jammed to some degree near initially disclosed values. Specifically, raters observe the pattern of initial ratings and follow suit by providing similar ratings. Finally, I find evidence that physicians anticipate rating jamming and so concentrate their effort on earlier performance in order to set a pattern of high ratings that later ratings follow. These results demonstrate that the disclosure of subjective ratings can benefit performance broadly but can also shift effort toward earlier performance.

Keywords: disclosure; real effects; information cascades; multitasking (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 I10 I11 L15 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 45 pages
Date: 2020-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Published in Journal of Accounting Research, 1, September, 2020, 58(4), pp. 1023 - 1067. ISSN: 0021-8456

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/105779/ Open access version. (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:ehl:lserod:105779

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().