Paper Contributes to Physician Decisions Literature

Oct 24-2023   

Path Dependency in Physician Decisions, a paper co-authored by Prof. Yi Junjian of the NSD, has recently been published by The Review of Economic Studies, a top journal for economics.

The authors examine path dependency in physician decisions in an emergency department setting, and find that physicians’ treatment decisions for the current and previous patients are positively correlated. The positive autocorrelation is higher when the current patient is of greater medical uncertainty or more similar to the previous patient in terms of observed characteristics and when the physician is less experienced or more fatigued. The author go on to show that these patterns are highly consistent with the memory and attention model (Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer, 2020), whereby the physician’s current decision is anchored to her previous decision. The results from both reduced-form analyses and structural estimations provide further support for the importance of memory and attention in physician decision-making.

The paper contributes to the research on physician decisions from the perspective of behavioral economics, which hitherto has been limited. It is based on the data of 253,466 patients treated by 129 physicians within a two-year span at large-scaled emergency departments of hospitals in Southeast Asia.

Prof. Yi Junjian is PKU Bo Ya Distinguished Professor and NSD Professor of Economics. His research focuses on labor and population economics, medical care and health economics, as well as development economics.

The other authors are Lawrence Jin of National University of Singapore; Rui Tang of Hong Kong University of Science and Technology; Han Ye of Lingnan University; and Songfa Zhong of National University of Singapore and New York University Abu Dhabi.