Exploring physician agency under demand‐side cost sharing—An experimental approach
通过实验室实验，研究未来医生是否在关注患者健康收益的同时，也关心患者的消费机会，发现医生确实会考虑患者的消费能力。
The assumption of patient-regarding physicians has been widely adopted in the health economics literature. Physicians' patient-regarding preferences are often described as the concern for the health benefits of medical treatments, and thus closely related to the norms and ethics of the medical profession. In this paper, we ask whether physicians' patient-regarding preferences include a concern for their patient's consumption opportunities alongside patient's health benefits. To identify and quantify physicians' preferences, we design and conduct an incentivized laboratory experiment where choices determine separately the health benefits and the consumption opportunities of a real patient admitted to the nearest hospital. We find strong evidence that future physicians care about their patients' consumption opportunities.