Does Prospective Physicians' Behavior Depend on Payment Systems? Results from a Laboratory Experiment Applying a Within-Subject-Design

摘要

In China, there is a lively debate about which health care system to introduce. The issue also involves how physicians should be paid to treat their patients optimally. We run a controlled laboratory experiment based on Hennig-Schmidt, Selten, and Wiesen (Journal of Health Economics, 2011) to contribute to this agenda. We analyze the influence of incentives from the most widely spread remuneration systems fee-for-service(FFS) and capitation (CAP) on physicians' supply of medical services.In our experiment, Chinese medical students act in the role of physicians. They choose quantities of medical services for patients with different states of health. We find that physicians provide significantly more services under FFS than under CAP, a tendency that corresponds to theoretical results and experimental findings in Germany and Canada. Moreover, the patient benefit deviates significantly from the patient optimumunder both payment systems even though students do not maximize their profits.