Intrinsic Benefits of Preference Satisfaction: Impact on Surgeons’ Service Performance
研究外科医生对手术室的偏好满足如何提升服务效率和质量，发现偏好满足能带来显著成本节约和福利改善，尤其在高负荷或复杂任务时效果更明显。
Problem definition: Our research investigates how preference satisfaction, particularly intrinsic values such as psychological comfort, can improve workers’ service efficiency and quality. Methodology/results: We utilize a unique setting to examine solely the intrinsic values driving workers’ service performance. In this setting, surgeons have operating room preferences that result only from intrinsic values because these operating rooms are instrumentally identical. Examining a comprehensive data set linking surgeons’ performances to their preferences for operating rooms, we confirm and quantify the intrinsic benefits of preference satisfaction on service efficiency and quality. We also find that compared with workers without preferences, workers with preferences perform better if satisfied, but worse if unsatisfied. Moreover, we find that when workers are under heavy workloads or performing complex tasks, these preference effects are more pronounced. Based on our findings, we update the surgery scheduling framework by incorporating surgeons’ preferences. Our counterfactual analysis shows that, for the operations in our sample, the upper-bound healthcare cost savings from satisfying surgeons’ preferences can exceed $3.5 million while also improving patients’ and surgeons’ welfare. Managerial implications: Our findings suggest that firms can utilize the intrinsic benefits of preference satisfaction as a lever to improve service performance without incurring the cost of instrumental changes. Moreover, firms can consider cultivating workers’ preferences if their systems have enough flexibility to satisfy them. When firms cannot satisfy the preferences of all workers, they can consider prioritizing workers with heavy workloads or complex tasks to maximize the improvement in service performance. Specifically for the healthcare industry, the scheduling system can integrate surgeons’ preferences for operating rooms into the optimization framework to achieve huge benefits in operation cost saving and patient welfare improvement at little expense. Funding: This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [Grants 71571048 and 71720107003]. Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/msom.2022.0435 .