Discounting and clinical decision making: Physicians, patients, the general public, and the management of asymptomatic abdominal aortic aneurysms
通过实验研究不同群体（内科医生、血管外科医生、全科医生、患者及潜在患者）对无症状腹主动脉瘤管理决策中的隐性贴现率差异，发现内科医生贴现率最高，且个人特征和财务激励影响贴现率，可能导致临床实践差异。
Clinical decisions often entail in intertemporal trade-off. Moreover, they often involve physicians of different specialities. In an experiment dealing with the management of small asymptomatic abdominal aortic aneurysms (a clinically relevant problem) we find that specialists in internal medicine exhibit higher implicit discount rates than vascular surgeons, general practitioners, and actual and prospective patients. Several personal characteristics expected to be directly related to pure time-preference and risk aversion (gender, smoking habits, age, place of employment) have the hypothesised effects. Additionally, financial incentives appear to affect the estimated implicit discount rates of physicians, but are unlikely to have caused the inter-group differences. Differences in discount rates could lead to variations in clinical practice, which may conflict with equality of treatment or equal access to health care.