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Custom Made Versus Ready to Wear Treatments; Behavioral Propensities in Physician's Choices

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Author Info
Richard G. Frank
Richard J. Zeckhauser

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Abstract

To customize treatments to individual patients entails costs of coordination and cognition. Thus, providers sometimes choose treatments based on norms for broad classes of patients. We develop behavioral hypotheses explaining when and why doctors customize to the particular patient, and when instead they employ "ready-to-wear" treatments. Our empirical studies examining length of office visits and physician prescribing behavior find evidence of norm-following behavior. Some such behavior, from our studies and from the literature, proves sensible; but other behavior seems far from optimal.

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Paper provided by National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc in its series NBER Working Papers with number 13445.

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Date of creation: Sep 2007
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Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:13445

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Find related papers by JEL classification:
D80 - Microeconomics - - Information, Knowledge, and Uncertainty - - - General
I11 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Analysis of Health Care Markets

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  1. Banerjee, Abhijit V, 1992. "A Simple Model of Herd Behavior," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 107(3), pages 797-817, August. [Downloadable!] (restricted)
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This page was last updated on 2008-11-16.

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