To test or not to test? Risk attitudes and prescribing by French GPs

Emmanuel Kemel (), Antoine Nebout and Bruno Ventelou
Additional contact information
Emmanuel Kemel: GREGHEC - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique

Working Papers from HAL

Abstract: Risk is a key dimension of economic decisions, but whether risk attitudes can predict real economic behaviour is still subject to investigation. We measure general practitioners' (GPs) risk attitudes and check for a relationship with variations in prescribing practices. Individual-level risk attitudes are elicited from simple survey choices on a representative national panel of 939 French GPs, and are linked to their volume of lab-test prescriptions through administrative records. Specifically, we estimate individual components of a flexible decision model under risk (rank-dependent utility) using random-coefficient estimations, and then treat these components as predictors of observed lab-test prescribing. We find that (1) GPs exhibit the usual patterns of risk attitudes: risk aversion and inverse S-shaped probability weighting prevails (2) risk aversion captured by the utility function is positively correlated with lab-test prescribing.

Keywords: General practitioners; risk attitudes; rank-dependent utility; lab-test prescribing; practice variation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08-31
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-isf and nep-upt
Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03330153
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://hal.science/hal-03330153/document (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:hal:wpaper:hal-03330153

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from HAL
Bibliographic data for series maintained by CCSD ().