“The Contribution of Patients and Providers to the Overuse of Prescription Drugs"
with Carolina Lopez and Simone Schaner

About the Seminar

Overuse of medical care is often attributed to an informed-expert problem, whereby doctors induce patients to purchase unnecessary treatments. Alternatively, patients may drive overuse of medications by exerting pressure on doctors to overprescribe, overriding the doctor’s gatekeeping function for prescription medications.

We develop a theoretical framework and designed a randomized trial to identify the relative importance of these two channels in driving overuse of antimalarials. Holding doctors’ financial incentives constant, we vary patients’ information about the availability of a discount for standard malaria treatment. We find evidence of patient-driven demand: informing patients directly of the price reduction, instead of allowing doctors to choose whether to share this information, increases use of the discount by 35 percent.

This significantly increases the share of patients treated for malaria, driven by patients least likely to have malaria, leading to a worse match between treatment and cause of illness. We find no evidence that doctors use their information advantage to sell more powerful malaria treatment or increase revenue.

The paper can be found HERE

About the Presenter


Anja Sautmann joined J-PAL Global as Director of Research, Education, and Training in July 2017. She is guiding J-PAL's efforts in providing research support to regional offices and affiliated professors, defining and monitoring research standards, and fostering research transparency. She also oversees J-PAL's internal training and external education initiatives. She has ongoing projects on health care subsidies and malaria prescription practices in Mali and electricity pricing in South Africa.

 
Previously, Anja was an Assistant Professor at Brown University, where she taught graduate and undergraduate classes in development economics and applied research methods. She has previously conducted research on dowries in India and the role of age in the marriage market, measuring the allocation and variation in consumption over time, the use of incentives for employees with biased self-confidence, and the effect of non-pecuniary incentives, like "nudges", on welfare.
 



Date: Wednesday, 15 August 2018
Lunch: 12h30 - 13h00, Staff Lounge, 4th Floor, School of Economics, Middle Campus
Seminar: 13h00 - 14h00, Seminar Room, 4th Floor, School of Economics, Middle Campus