IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/nbr/nberwo/29301.html

Technology Adoption and Market Allocation:The Case of Robotic Surgery

Author

Listed:
  • Danea Horn
  • Adam Sacarny
  • R. Annetta Zhou

Abstract

The adoption of healthcare technology is central to improving productivity in this sector. To provide new evidence on how technology affects healthcare markets, we focus on one area where adoption has been particularly rapid: surgery for prostate cancer. Over just six years, robotic surgery grew to become the dominant intensive prostate cancer treatment method. Using a difference-in-differences design, we show that adopting a robot drives prostate cancer patients to the hospital. To test whether this result reflects market expansion or business stealing, we also consider market-level effects of adoption and find they are significant but smaller, suggesting that adoption expands the market while also reallocating some patients across hospitals. Marginal patients are relatively young and healthy, inconsistent with the concern that adoption broadens the criteria for intervention to patients who would gain little from it. We conclude by discussing implications for the social value of technology diffusion in healthcare markets.

Suggested Citation

  • Danea Horn & Adam Sacarny & R. Annetta Zhou, 2021. "Technology Adoption and Market Allocation:The Case of Robotic Surgery," NBER Working Papers 29301, National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc.
    • Handle: RePEc:nbr:nberwo:29301
    Note: EH
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w29301.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    Other versions of this item:

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Tafti, Elena Ashtari, 2023. "Technology, Skills, and Performance: The Case of Robots in Surgery," CINCH Working Paper Series (since 2020) 78746, Duisburg-Essen University Library, DuEPublico.
    2. Janssen, Aljoscha, 2022. "Innovation Begets Innovation and Concentration: The Case of Upstream Oil & Gas in the North Sea," Working Paper Series 1431, Research Institute of Industrial Economics.
    3. Michele Fioretti & Alessandro Iaria & Aljoscha Janssen & Cl'ement Mazet-Sonilhac & Robert K. Perrons, 2022. "Sovereign Hold-Up and Technology Adoption: Evidence from the North Sea," Papers 2205.13186, arXiv.org, revised Feb 2026.
    4. Qiren Liu & Sen Luo & Robert Seamans, 2023. "Pain or Anxiety? The Health Consequences of Rising Robot Adoption in China," Papers 2301.10675, arXiv.org.
    5. Michele Fioretti & Alessandro Iaria & Aljoscha Janssen & Robert K Perrons & Clément Mazet-Sonilhac, 2022. "Innovation Begets Innovation and Concentration: the Case of Upstream Oil & Gas in the North Sea," Working Papers hal-03791971, HAL.
    6. Laia Maynou & Alistair McGuire & Victoria Serra‐Sastre, 2024. "Efficiency and productivity gains of robotic surgery: The case of the English National Health Service," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 33(8), pages 1831-1856, August.
    7. Elena Ashtari Tafti, 2022. "Technology, skills, and performance: the case of robots in surgery," IFS Working Papers W22/46, Institute for Fiscal Studies.

    More about this item

    JEL classification:

    • I1 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health
    • L1 - Industrial Organization - - Market Structure, Firm Strategy, and Market Performance

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    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:nbr:nberwo:29301. 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: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/nberrus.html .

    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.