The Efficiency of Slacking off: Evidence From the Emergency Department
研究急诊科医生在轮班结束时减少接诊病人（偷懒）并缩短病人诊疗时间，导致医院成本增加，但发现这种偷懒行为在考虑整体成本后接近次优效率水平。
Work schedules play an important role in utilizing labor in organizations. In this study of emergency department physicians in shift work, schedules induce two distortions: First, physicians “slack off†by accepting fewer patients near end of shift (EOS). Second, physicians distort patient care, incurring higher costs as they spend less time on patients assigned near EOS. Examining how these effects change with shift overlap reveals a tradeoff between the two. Within an hour after the normal time of work completion, physicians are willing to spend hospital resources more than six times their market wage to preserve their leisure. Accounting for overall costs, I find that physicians slack off at approximately second†best optimal levels.