Advances in health economics and health services research
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Adv Health Econ Health Serv Res · Jan 2008
The potential role of regret in the physician-patient relationship: insights from neuroeconomics.
The aim of the chapter is to show how two important facts of physicians' behavior, (i) their tendency to "create" the demand for medical practices, and (ii) their delay and reluctance in using new treatments and therapies, can be explained with the lens of the neuroeconomics research on the neural and behavioral basis of regret. ⋯ We limited our analysis to the potential role of anticipated regret; therefore, this chapter neglects many important factors of the health sector.
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This chapter discusses the role of emotion expression in decision-making. To understand connections between emotion and decision it is helpful first to differentiate between emotion experience and emotion expression. Understanding how emotion expression influences decision-making is important as a practical matter. However, in contrast to emotion experience, economic research has paid little attention to the significance of emotion expression in decision-making. ⋯ In contrast to emotions, which are typically difficult to control, I suggest that opportunities for emotion expression can feasibly be manipulated through appropriately designed policies. I further suggest that this approach may have the ability to positively affect well-being and economic outcomes. VALUE OF THE CHAPTER: The chapter provides new perspectives on how policy-makers can benefit by understanding the effect of emotion expression in decision-making. The chapter also suggests future research to improve our understanding of emotion expression.
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Initial explorations in the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics have highlighted evidence supporting a potential dissociation between a fast automatic system and a slow deliberative controlled system. Growing research in the role of emotion in decision-making has attempted to draw parallels to the automatic system. This chapter will discuss a theoretical framework for understanding the role of emotion in decision-making and evidence supporting the underlying neural substrates. ⋯ This chapter provides a more specific conceptualization of the mediating role of emotions in the decision-making process, which has important implications for understanding the interacting neural systems underlying the interface between emotion and cognition--a topic of immediate value to anyone investigating topics within the context of social-cognitive-affective-neuroscience.
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Adv Health Econ Health Serv Res · Jan 2008
Expectations mediate objective physiological placebo effects.
A placebo effect is a (positive) change in health outcomes that is due to a (positive) change in beliefs about the value of a treatment. Placebo effects might be "behavioral," in the sense that revised beliefs lead to behavioral changes or new actions that in turn yield changes in health outcomes. Placebo effects might also include a "physiological" component, which refers broadly to non-behavioral, brain-modulated mechanisms by which new beliefs cause changes in health outcomes. Nearly all formal economic models of human behavior are consistent with behavioral placebo effects, but strongly inconsistent with their physiological counterparts. The reason is that the latter effects can imply that expectations enter, rather than multiply, state-contingent preferences. It is therefore unfortunate that little evidence exists on physiological placebo effects. We report data from novel clinical experiments with caffeine that seek to provide such evidence. ⋯ Our results are consistent with the possibility that the prefrontal cortex provides external, top-down control that modulates physiological outcomes, and make a case for the importance of research geared toward developing appropriate and tractable frameworks that accommodate non-linear relationships between expectations and preferences.