Shash Dholakia
ECO 341
3/23/14
Final Paper
In this paper I aim to tie the concepts of behavioral economics to issues in health economics. The goal is to use economics and psychology to explain how patients or physicians stray from the assumptions of the standard economic theory. In it through behavioral economic concepts that help researchers analyze and forecast patient or physician behavior. Behavioral economics has neumerous applications in the medical care field and these ideas can be used to create better health outcomes and stronger policies. I will be observing the economic issue of asymmetric information in certain spaces in the medical care field. According to the standard economic theory decision makers are fully informed have rational preferences with the aim to maximize utility. Behavioral economics literature examines patient and physician decision making through a variety of lenses such as the concepts of radical uncertainty and visceral factors. Through research and observation it is only “rational” to apply concepts of behavioral economics. In this sector uncertainty hovers above every decision where patients have limited information that influence decisions in the environment of fear make choices in the context of fear and trust in the physician. Every situation the medical field is unique to its own and this creates a great deal of uncertainties. These uncertainties can infiltrate decisions about diagnosis, treatment and prognosis. Since this is such a broad subject I will narrow it down to a few topics to explain the ideas. I will try to show patient and physician decision making capacity in risk situations and use the example of end of life care to make the argument tangible.
I will begin by giving an overview...
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...d treatment it is tough to understand under such stress. That statistic shows the amount of uncertainty there is in such a complex situation. In the case of lung cancer a decision maker cannot be sure if medications will improve life or have side effects. The only information he has is statistical evidence of previous cases. This is an inefficient way to make decisions because each case in medicine is unique to its own. Furthermore, with end of life lung cancer one cannot be sure if radiation or surgery will improve life or make it worse. Making decisions under radical uncertainty with risk information is one to be analyzed. Every decision maker is different and to gain an understanding of how people make decision under uncertainty is important to know because risks to do not exist in a vacuum. Risk choices are susceptible to human response with respect to fear.
When it comes to a bad diagnosis it is often difficult for doctors to tell their patients this devastating news. The doctor will likely hold back from telling the patient the whole truth about their health because they believe the patient will become depressed. However, Schwartz argues that telling the patient the whole truth about their illness will cause depression and anxiety, but rather telling the patient the whole truth will empower and motivate the patient to make the most of their days. Many doctors will often also prescribe or offer treatment that will likely not help their health, but the doctors do so to make patients feel as though their may be a solution to the problem as they are unaware to the limited number of days they may have left. In comparison, people who are aware there is no cure to their diagnosis and many choose to live their last days not in the hospital or pain free from medications without a treatment holding them back. They can choose to live their last days with their family and will have more time and awareness to handle a will. Schwartz argues the importance of telling patients the truth about their diagnosis and communicating the person’s likely amount of time left as it will affect how the patient chooses to live their limited
All creatures on earth just want to live very long, and the human has more avid than any other creature on our planet. The patients having critical diseases want to prolong their lives, so they want to believe in doctors and modern medical system. I believe that they want to live because they still have a lot of things that they have to do, or they don’t want to make their family feel upset when they pass away. Moreover, their family have too many expectations of the medical treatments and the doctors, but the results are always negative. My close friend’s family is an example. When his grandmother’s diabetes was in the last period, she had to get some surgeries because her feet were gangrenous. After that surgeries, she told she feels very painful and just wants to die, but she does not want to make her family feel bad. Therefore, she had suffered her painful with an expectation prolonging her life on a hospital bed. Many people nearing the end of their lives have to suffer many medical treatments looking like a mortification. “Many people think of CPR as a reliable life save when, in face, the results are usually poor,” written by the author, has demonstrated for that examples. In addition, the doctors are the second factor that affects to the decision using medical treatments. All of the doctors just want to try their best to cure the patients, and they want to help the
Values of caution and knowledge coincide in driving Welch to his conclusion of overdiagnosis due to society’s enthusiasm for everything medical. Welch concludes early on that the benefit of sticking to tried and true forms of healthcare overrides the belief that
The development of a new CBE scale is justifiable based on the explanation of the relationship among antecedents, construct and consequences under an unique theoretical framework. In doing so, this study resulted in strong empirical evidence of the Expectancy Theory (ET) framework for explaining consumer brand engagement self-selected brands. The sequence of effort (cognitive, behavior and emotional), performance (consumer brand engagement) and outcomes (BRR & CBE-O) chain of effects was large and significant. The effort-performance (E-P) causal relation was operationalized by the effort based dimensions of CBE, namely Cognitive, Behavioral and Emotional. The performance-outcome (P-O) causal relation was operationalized by the consumer brand engagement concept, and instrumentality was operationalized as the Brand Related Rewards (BRR) to consumer brand engagement outcomes (CBE-O). It was demonstrated that the brand engagement dimensions predict expected Brand Related Rewards (BRR), which in turn predicts consumer brand engagement outcomes (CBE-O). As a result, hypothesis H3a and H3b were supported. Additionally, the measurements of these constructs are mostly invariant (or partially invariant), with adequate parameter stability.
Having known that adults are supposed to be self-directed, internally motivated and goal-oriented in the learning process, it is believed that Expectancy-Value Theory proposed by Wigfiled and his colleagues might be fruitful in explaining adults’ learning motivation in this case study.
According to American Cancer Society, statistic shows over 228,190 new cases of lung cancer are reported yearly, that’s 57% men and 43% women of the pie. The number shows lung cancer is likely happen to men. Also the estimated reported death is 159,480, mostly 54% men and only 46% women. The concern on lung cancer contributes 27% of the cancer death in United States. The contribution of lung cancer plays a big pie on many deaths in American. Also, most of the patients are men. The chance that a man will develop lung cancer in his lifetime is about 1 in 13; for a woman, the risk is about 1 in 16. These numbers include both smokers and non-smokers. For smokers the risk is much higher, while for non-smokers the risk is lower. (Accor...
There is a difficult balance between the explanations and statistical correctness explanations of survival data that is understood by many medically ill patients. Although such circumstances can be very tough to deal with, the late Stephen Jay Gould who better translated the ways median characteristics alter our interpretation of messages. Gould was biologist who illustrated about his median statistical life expectancy following his diagnosis with a fatal tumor abdominal mesothelioma. The prognosis determined he had the median mortality totaling eight months (Gould 1985). Nevertheless, Gould didn’t allow his diagnosis to be the main determinant of its outcome. As a biologist and a person with training in statistics, Gould knew that a median is simply a variation of the hard reality rather than imperfect measure for a central tendency (Gould 1985). Gould used individual variabilities to analyze and determine the way in which an individual should appreciate and understand
...preference predictions into the shared decision- making process if this reduces the stress and burden on their loved ones and increases the chances that they will receive treatment consistent with their preferences and values. If true, using preference predictions would also promote the goal of respecting patients’ preferences regarding how treatment decisions are made for them."
Children’s behaviour is constantly changing and evolving as they learn about themselves and construct their own identities within different environments. The sociocultural theory acknowledges that social interactions are central to these continuous changes in thoughts and behaviour, varying significantly from one culture to the next. The key focus of this essay is to determine what behaviour is, with the consideration that behaviour is a socio-cultural construct and whether "Children’s capacity to choose appropriate behaviour is influenced by their developmental ability, temperament, interactions, life experiences and environmental factors” (Government of South Australia, 2004).
The topic that I will be focusing on for this assignment is on the screening of lung cancer, since this is one of the most controversial debates all across the world. The significance of this topic is that when it comes to lung cancer screening, many individuals may or may not abide by it. There are many reasons to why individuals may not want to have their screening done for lung cancer. The top two reasons are that the screening itself is expensive and secondly, the results that they get from the screening may not be accurate. Imagine, if the results came up as a positive, for the ones who really do not have lung cancer, the amount of pain, time and money that they have put into the curing of lung cancer, is painful. At the same, time it is not fair for them to go through this much, when they actually do not have lung cancer. In this paper, I will discuss how lung cancer screening is a controversial issue and why it impacts us as a society and what problems that the family members, friends and medical doctors have to face if something does goes wrong.. Here is a portion of my essay that will appear on the final copy of my essay.
First, let’s consider the reasoning behind the patients choosing to forego extraordinary treatment for their cancer. They have decided, as Beauchamp would put it, that refusing to prolong their lives in the face of pain and suffering “neither harms nor wrongs [them] and may provide a benefit” (Beauchamp, 76). They “intend to quit life because of its bleak possibilities” (Beauchamp, 77). The doctor readily complies with their wishes out of moral, legal, and professional obligation. A choice has been made to let both patients die, as a response to their “competent and authoritative refusal of treatment” (Beauchamp 74).
Can a person’s worth be measured? Every person’s value or purpose in life is quantifiable by the economic worth of each individual. Those who are a burden to society by not being able to reach financial balance and must rely on others to provide and therefore are seen as dispensable. This is book argues that human life has no worth and we are only valued for what we can provide for those around us. Thus, those who can provide more to those around us are more successful in life. Within the book The Unit, a single person’s purpose and value in life is quantifiable to the economic worth of every other individual.
What is subjective expected utility (SEU)? Subjective expected utility (SEU) is the choices we make in everyday that can benefits us to a greater or positive position in life. This theory is basically saying that we do not merely become a criminal because we want to; it is the choices of everyday life we make. Criminals choose a different path and don’t think the after action or what will happen to them after the crime is committed. It’s like when a person is going to a grocery store and he does not have money to feed his children and wife he has a chose of either to let his family starve or shop lift and endure all the consequence if he gets caught. Subjective expected utility (SEU) is the choices we make or the understanding why make these bad choices just to have a more money or better life despite the consequence or the probability of being caught, as well as the cost of the expected level of penalty have to be considered.
There are many types of diverse people classified under various categories. Some people have different types of personalities. They could be classified as extremely manipulative, others as impulsive, and some may not show anything on the outside and have wonderful social skills. These categories help in the understanding of humans. This study is called Psychology and there are many different subfields in this diverse study of the people around us. One subfield that is particularly interesting is personality psychology. Personality psychology is a branch of psychology that studies personality and its variation between individuals.
Social cognitive theory is the study on how an individual stores, processes, and applies information about others in their everyday life. It was first known as the “Social Learning Theory”, and was later changed to the term known today as the “Social Cognitive Theory”. The definition of social cognition is defined as any cognitive process that involves one or more than one person. While the definition of cognition is unconscious process in the brain that bring about representations. Social cognition purpose is to study social knowledge, social structure, group behavior, social influences, social categories (age, race, sex) defines a person. (Science Direct) Social cognition is thought to be the outcome of social interactions. One will learn by observing others, this is known as vicarious learning. For example, one is more likely to follow another’s behavior if they can identify with them, whether it be personality wise, age proximity, and more. (Verywell)