Health and Marketing: Essays on Physician and Patient Decision-Making

In this dissertation, I focus on physician and patient behavior. I model patient and physician decisions by integrating robust insights from different behavioral sciences (e.g. economics, psychology and sociology) in econometric models calibrated on individual data. This approach allows me to bring novel insights for managers, policy-makers and patients about: (1) how physicians learn from patient feedback about a new drug (in particular, how switching patients are 7 to 10 times more salient, in physicians' memory, than patients who refill their medication), (2) the relationship between patient empowerment and patient non-adherence to physician advice (in particular, the importance of going beyond the logic of self-determination theory, which predicts that empowering patients in the medical encounter is always beneficial, and consider side effects like patient overconfidence which, in the case of therapy adherence, actually make patient empowerment undesirable), and (3) the main drivers of patient drug requests by brand name and the physician’s accommodation of such requests (in particular, comparing the importance of health information obtained via mass-media, word-of-mouth from expert consumers, word-of-mouth from other consumers and patient values).

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