Dr. Heike Hennig-Schmidt and Daniel Wiesen will be visiting our chair on December 4th 2008 and will present their joint research paper Physicians’ Provision Behavior under Different Payment Systems – An Experimental Investigation coauthored by Prof. Dr. Reinhard Selten in the cege research lecture series. Dr. Hennig-Schmidt received her PhD from the University of Bonn and authored her PhD thesis Bargaining in a Video Experiment – Determinants of Boundedly Rational Behavior under the advice of Reinhard Selten. She currently heads the University of Bonn Experimental Economics Laboratory. Daniel Wiesen is a PhD student at the University of Bonn.
Hennig-Schmidt, Selten and Wiesen investigate the influence of the institutional parameter ‘payment system’ on physician behavior in their experimental study and let medical students decide on the quantity of medical services for fictional patients in a controlled laboratory experiment. They examine two pure payment systems with different financial incentives. Under the fee for service (FFS) payment system each medical procedure or service is remunerated while physicians receive fixed installments for registered patients irrespective the quantity of services rendered under the capitation (CAP) payment system. The experimental economists observe in their experiment that participants impersonating physicians tend to overserve their fictional patients in case of FFS and to underserve their patients in case of CAP. Patients with a low demand for physician services therefore would be better served under the CAP whereas patients with a high demand would be better off under the FFS. In addition, the experimental results show that physicians not only pay attention to financial incentives but also to patient benefit.
The event takes place December 4th 2008, 4:15pm at room 0.167. Interested parties are cordially invited to attend the seminar.
The paper Physicians’ Provision Behavior under Different Payment Systems – An Experimental Investigation can be found here.