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Review of Economic Studies Vol. 91 No. 5 2024

Path Dependency in Physician Decisions

Lawrence Jin1; Rui Tang2; Han Ye3; Junjian Yi4; Songfa Zhong5

1 National University of Singapore Singapore · 2 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology , Hong Kong SAR , China · 3 Lingnan University, Hong Kong SAR , China · 4 Peking University , China · 5 Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, Hong Kong SAR, China; National University of Singapore , Singapore

Abstract

We examine path dependency in physician decisions in an emergency department setting, and find that physicians’ treatment decisions for the current and previous patients are positively correlated. We show that the positive autocorrelation is higher when the current patient is of greater medical uncertainty or more similar to the previous patient in terms of observed characteristics and when the physician is less experienced or more fatigued. We then show that these patterns are highly consistent with the memory and attention model, whereby the physician’s current decision is anchored to her previous decision. The results from both reduced-form analyses and structural estimations provide further support for the importance of memory and attention in physician decision-making.

DOI
10.1093/restud/rdad096
Volume
91
Issue
5
Pages
2916-2953
Language
en
Sources
bibtex:phds-export.bib openalex crossref

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