Do Second Opinions Effectively Inhibit Overtreatment?—An Experiment Based on Heterogeneous Social Preferences
As a typical credence goods market,the medical market suffers from inefficiencies caused by superior information of physicians.Overtreatment is the most common form of physicians'fraudulence,which not only increases the cost of pa-tients,but also results in waste on medical resources.Based on the heterogeneity of social preferences,we apply a laboratory experiment to study the effectiveness and robustness of second opinions on inhibiting overtreatment.In the recognition of so-cial preferences,54.17% of the subjects are efficiency-loving,and 33.33% of the subjects are highly self-interested.The overtreatment rate of efficiency-loving physicians is lower than that of self-interested physicians.In the analysis of the effec-tiveness of the mechanism,we confirm that second opinions do significantly inhibit overtreatment.However,if physicians can identify patients requesting second opinions,the overall overtreatment rate will dramatically rise,even higher than that in the condition without second opinions.For the sub-sample divided by social preferences,the effect of second opinions is not ro-bust:self-interested physicians'behavior doesn't perform significantly different,while efficiency-loving physicians'over-treatment rate decreases significantly.This study provides important policy references for Chinese medical system reform.With the emergence of online healthcare and artificial intelligence technology,promoting second opinions can serve as a sig-nificant approach to mitigate overtreatment.Moreover,the government needs to address the resilience of policies across di-verse demographics,such as reinforcing physicians'professional ethics.
Medical MarketSecond OpinionsSocial PreferencesOvertreatment
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