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To test or not to test? Risk attitudes and prescribing by French GPs

Author

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  • Emmanuel Kemel

    (GREGHEC - Groupement de Recherche et d'Etudes en Gestion - HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales - CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, HEC Paris - Ecole des Hautes Etudes Commerciales, CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

  • Antoine Nebout

    (INRAE - Institut National de Recherche pour l’Agriculture, l’Alimentation et l’Environnement)

  • Bruno Ventelou

    (CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)

Abstract

Risk is a key dimension of economic decisions, but whether risk attitudes can predict real economic behaviour is still subject to investigation. We measure general practitioners' (GPs) risk attitudes and check for a relationship with variations in prescribing practices. Individual-level risk attitudes are elicited from simple survey choices on a representative national panel of 939 French GPs, and are linked to their volume of lab-test prescriptions through administrative records. Specifically, we estimate individual components of a flexible decision model under risk (rank-dependent utility) using random-coefficient estimations, and then treat these components as predictors of observed lab-test prescribing. We find that (1) GPs exhibit the usual patterns of risk attitudes: risk aversion and inverse S-shaped probability weighting prevails (2) risk aversion captured by the utility function is positively correlated with lab-test prescribing.

Suggested Citation

  • Emmanuel Kemel & Antoine Nebout & Bruno Ventelou, 2021. "To test or not to test? Risk attitudes and prescribing by French GPs," Working Papers hal-03330153, HAL.
    • Handle: RePEc:hal:wpaper:hal-03330153
    Note: View the original document on HAL open archive server: https://hal.science/hal-03330153
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    Keywords

    General practitioners; risk attitudes; rank-dependent utility; lab-test prescribing; practice variation;
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