Essays in experimental health economics

Abstract

In order to implement effective health policy reforms, knowledge of physician preferences, and hence, their responses to policy reforms is desirable. This thesis consists of three papers aiming to address fundamental research questions on physician behavior. Paper I investigates whether the change of information scheme affects physicians’ prescribing behavior. The results suggest that preannouncing a mystery shopper audit reduces physicians’ probability of prescribing drugs to the pseudopatients. Paper II explores physicians’ response to cost-sharing borne by the patients and finds that future physicians are concerned about the influences of their medical treatment choices on patients’ consumption opportunities after co-payment. Paper III introduces a strategic decision scenario and studies physician treatment decisions under competition. The results indicate that the substantial difference in behavior between markets may be attributed to changes in individuals’ scale parameter. The scale parameter rises as markets become more competitive, implying a higher degree of determinism in behavior. The data of all three papers are collected from experiments. Under the framework of stochastic choice theory, three special cases of a generalized multinomial logit model are employed in the data analysis.