Please join us for our next CBSSM Fall 2013 seminar. Dr. Iris Kesternich will present a talk entitled:

Homo hippocraticus or homo economics: On physician agency, distributional preferences and professional norms

Summary: Physician decisions determine both the level and the distribution of health care spending to a large extent. The analysis of physician agency describes how physicians trade-off their own and patient benefits when a third party bears the cost for the provision of their services. This project concentrates on two aspects that have received little attention in the discussion on physician agency so far: First, how are distributional preferences defined in situations of concentrated benefits (patients) and dispersed costs (tax payers or insurees)? And secondly, how do medical ethics affect the trade-off between physician profit, patient benefit and society?

Dr. Kestenich is Assistant Professor at the Seminar for Comparative Economics, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München.