Expert decisions often deviate from evidence-based guidelines. If experts are unaware of guidelines, dissemination may improve outcomes. If experts are aware of guidelines but continue to deviate, promoting stricter adherence has ambiguous effects on outcomes depending on whether experts have...

We develop a model of the efficiency of medical testing based on rates of negative CT scans for pulmonary embolism. The model is estimated using a 20% sample of Medicare claims from 2000- 2009. We document enormous across-doctor heterogeneity in testing decisions conditional on patient risk and...

We develop a model of the efficiency of medical testing based on rates of negative CT scans for pulmonary embolism. The model is estimated using a 20% sample of Medicare claims from 2000- 2009. We document enormous across-doctor heterogeneity in testing decisions conditional on patient risk and...

We estimate the effect of physician-patient relationships on clinical decisions in a setting where the treating physician is as good as randomly assigned. OBs are 25% (4 percentage points) more likely to perform a C-section when delivering patients with whom they have a pre-existing clinical...

Substantial practice variation across physicians for seemingly similar patients remains an unresolved puzzle. This paper studies physicians in training to explore the behavioral foundations of practice variation. A discontinuity in the formation of teams reveals a large contribution of relative...

Work schedules play an important role in utilizing labor in organizations. In this study of emergency department physicians in shift work, schedules induce two distortions: First, physicians "slack off" by accepting fewer patients near end of shift (EOS). Second, physicians distort patient care,...

Physicians, judges, teachers, and agents in many other settings differ systematically in the decisions they make when faced with similar cases. Standard approaches to interpreting and exploiting such differences assume they arise solely from variation in preferences. We develop an alternative...

In setting prices for physician services, Medicare solicits input from a committee that evaluates proposals from industry. We investigate whether this arrangement leads to prices biased toward the interests of committee members. We find that increasing a measure of affiliation between the...

Local opinion leaders may play a key role in easing information frictions associated with technology adoption. This paper analyzes the influence of physician investigators who lead clinical trials for new cancer drugs. By comparing diffusion patterns across 21 new cancer drugs, we separate...