Reconciling Physician Bias and Recommendations

Physicians Treating Physicians: Relational and Informational Advantages in Treatment and Survival

“…The importance of the relational and informational influences on healthcare agency issues is evaluated in this paper by studying Taiwanese inpatient doctors 1 Alongside experimental designs, several observational studies have compared self-treatment with treating others to detect healthcare agency problems (Bronnenberg et al, 2015;Carrera and Skipper, 2017); Levitt and Syverson (2008) adopted the same approach to test for agency problems using expert-consumers. However, this comparison may capture the difference in the susceptibility of self-treatment versus treating others, not necessarily reflecting the physician-patients' effect on treatment choice (Ubel, Angot, and Zikmund-Fisher, 2011;Shaban, Guerry, and Quill, 2011). Earlier researchers avoided the susceptibility bias by comparing expert-consumers to non-experts, or physician-patients to other patients (Bunker and Brown, 1974;Hay and Leahy, 1982;Earle et al, 1993).…”