Experimental evidence of physician social preferences. Academic Article uri icon

Overview

abstract

  • Physicians' professional ethics require that they put patients' interests ahead of their own and that they should allocate limited medical resources efficiently. Understanding physicians' extent of adherence to these principles requires understanding the social preferences that lie behind them. These social preferences may be divided into two qualitatively different trade-offs: the trade-off between self and other (altruism) and the trade-off between reducing differences in payoffs (equality) and increasing total payoffs (efficiency). We experimentally measure social preferences among a nationwide sample of practicing physicians in the United States. Our design allows us to distinguish empirically between altruism and equality-efficiency orientation and to accurately measure both trade-offs at the level of the individual subject. We further compare the experimentally measured social preferences of physicians with those of a representative sample of Americans, an "elite" subsample of Americans, and a nationwide sample of medical students. We find that physicians' altruism stands out. Although most physicians place a greater weight on self than on other, the share of physicians who place a greater weight on other than on self is twice as large as for all other samples-32% as compared with 15 to 17%. Subjects in the general population are the closest to physicians in terms of altruism. The higher altruism among physicians compared with the other samples cannot be explained by income or age differences. By contrast, physicians' preferences regarding equality-efficiency orientation are not meaningfully different from those of the general sample and elite subsample and are less efficiency oriented than medical students.

publication date

  • July 6, 2022

Research

keywords

  • Altruism
  • Physicians
  • Professionalism

Identity

PubMed Central ID

  • PMC9282368

Scopus Document Identifier

  • 85133852994

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

  • 10.1056/CAT.20.0226

PubMed ID

  • 35867734

Additional Document Info

volume

  • 119

issue

  • 28