[go: up one dir, main page]
IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/hal/journl/hal-03137768.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Health Services as Credence Goods: a Field Experiment

Author

Listed:
  • Felix Gottschalk
  • Wanda Mimra

    (LEM - Lille économie management - UMR 9221 - UA - Université d'Artois - UCL - Université catholique de Lille - Université de Lille - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Christian Waibel
Abstract
Agency problems are a defining characteristic of healthcare markets. We present the results from a field experiment in the market for dental care: a test patient who does not need treatment is sent to 180 dentists to receive treatment recommendations. In the experiment, we vary the socio-economic status of the patient and whether a second opinion signal is sent. Furthermore, measures of market, practice and dentist characteristics are collected. We observe an overtreatment recommendation rate of 28% and a striking heterogeneity in treatment recommendations. Furthermore, we find significantly fewer overtreatment recommendations for patients with higher socio-economic status compared with lower socio-economic status for standard visits, suggesting a complex role for patients' socio-economic status. Competition intensity, measured by dentist density, does not have a significant influence on overtreatment. Dentists with shorter waiting times are more likely to propose unnecessary treatment.

Suggested Citation

  • Felix Gottschalk & Wanda Mimra & Christian Waibel, 2020. "Health Services as Credence Goods: a Field Experiment," Post-Print hal-03137768, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03137768
    DOI: 10.1093/ej/ueaa024
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:hal:journl:hal-03137768. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: CCSD (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.