The public defence will be held as a video conference over Zoom.
The defence will follow regular procedure as far as possible, hence it will be open to the public and the audience can ask ex auditorio questions when invited to do so.
Click here to participate in the public defence
Due to copyright reasons, an electronic copy of the thesis must be ordered from the faculty. In order for the faculty to have time to process the order, it must be received by the faculty no later than 2 days prior to the public defence. Orders received later than 2 days before the defence will not be processed. Inquiries regarding the thesis after the public defence must be addressed to the candidate.
Digital Trial Lecture – time and place
Adjudication committee
- First opponent: Professor Anthony Scott, Melbourne Institute, University of Melbourne
- Second opponent: Professor Trine Kjær, University of Southern Denmark
- Third member and chair of the evaluation committee: Professor Nina K. Vøllestad, University of Oslo
Chair of the Defence
Professor Hilde Lurås, University of Oslo
Principal Supervisor
Associate professor Geir Godager, University of Oslo
Summary
In order to implement effective health policy reforms, knowledge of physician preferences, and hence, their responses to policy reforms is desirable. This thesis consists of three papers aiming to address fundamental research questions on physician behavior. Paper I investigates whether the change of information scheme affects physicians’ prescribing behavior. The results suggest that preannouncing a mystery shopper audit reduces physicians’ probability of prescribing drugs to the pseudopatients. Paper II explores physicians’ response to cost-sharing borne by the patients and finds that future physicians are concerned about the influences of their medical treatment choices on patients’ consumption opportunities after co-payment. Paper III introduces a strategic decision scenario and studies physician treatment decisions under competition. The results indicate that the substantial difference in behavior between markets may be attributed to changes in individuals’ scale parameter. The scale parameter rises as markets become more competitive, implying a higher degree of determinism in behavior. The data of all three papers are collected from experiments. Under the framework of stochastic choice theory, three special cases of a generalized multinomial logit model are employed in the data analysis.
Additional information
Contact the research support staff.