Professional norms and physician behavior: homo oeconomicus or homo hippocraticus?

Physicians' treatment decisions determine the level of health care
spending to a large extent. The analysis of physician agency
describes how doctors trade off their own and their patients'
benefits, with a third party (such as the collective of insured
individuals or the taxpayers) bearing the costs. Professional norms
are viewed as restraining physicians' self-interest and as
introducing altruism towards the patient. We present a controlled
experiment that analyzes the impact of professional norms on
prospective physicians' trade-offs between her own profits, the
patients' benefits, and the payers' expenses for medical care. We
find that professional norms derived from the Hippocratic tradition
shift weight to the patient in the physician's decisions while
decreasing his self-interest and efficiency concerns.