Arrieta Alejandro, García-Prado Ariadna, González Paula, Pinto-Prades José Luis
Florida International University, Miami, FL, USA.
Universidad Pública de Navarra, Pamplona, Spain.
Health Econ. 2017 Dec;26 Suppl 3:97-113. doi: 10.1002/hec.3628.
The aim of this paper is to investigate how risk attitudes in medical decisions for others vary across health contexts. A lab experiment was designed to elicit the risk attitudes of 257 medical and nonmedical students by assigning them the role of a physician who must decide between treatments for patients. An interval regression model was used to estimate individual coefficients of relative risk aversion, and an estimation model was used to test for the effect of type of medical decision and experimental design characteristics on elicited risk aversion. We find that (a) risk attitudes vary across different health contexts, but risk aversion prevails in all of them; (b) students enrolled in health-related degrees show a higher degree of risk aversion; and (c) real rewards for third parties (patients) make subjects less risk-averse. The results underline the importance of accounting for attitudes towards risk in medical decision making.
本文旨在研究在为他人做出医疗决策时，风险态度如何因健康状况而异。设计了一项实验室实验，通过让257名医学和非医学专业学生扮演医生的角色，为患者选择治疗方案，来引出他们的风险态度。使用区间回归模型估计相对风险厌恶的个体系数，并使用估计模型检验医疗决策类型和实验设计特征对引出的风险厌恶的影响。我们发现：（a）风险态度因不同的健康状况而异，但在所有状况下风险厌恶都占主导；（b）攻读与健康相关学位的学生表现出更高程度的风险厌恶；（c）对第三方（患者）的实际奖励会使受试者的风险厌恶程度降低。研究结果强调了在医疗决策中考虑风险态度的重要性。
