BEHAVIORAL LOGICS OF THE SELF-EMPLOYED PRACTITIONERS. A STATISTICAL APPROACH OF THEIR PRICING PRACTICES.

Abstract

We focus on the private practitioner's voluntary choices of the pricing practices (free care and high fee care) to understand the practitioners' economic behavior. We use an unbalanced panel data comprising 7896 self-employed physicians who were observed over the 1980-2000 period. Our results offer an empirical understanding of the practitioners' motivations and put forward the deformation of medical behavior: a "price" strategy takes a dominant position.