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  3. American Economic Review: Insights
  4. December 2022
  5. A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Guideline Adherence and Access to Expertise

A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Guideline Adherence and Access to Expertise

  • Amy Finkelstein
  • Petra Persson
  • Maria Polyakova
  • Jesse M. Shapiro
American Economic Review: Insights
vol. 4, no. 4, December 2022
(pp. 507-26)
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Abstract

We use administrative data from Sweden to study adherence to 63 medication-related guidelines. We compare the adherence of patients without personal access to medical expertise to that of patients with access, namely doctors and their close relatives. We estimate that observably similar patients with access to expertise have 3.8 percentage points lower adherence, relative to a baseline adherence rate of 54.4 percent among those without access. Our findings suggest an important role in nonadherence for factors other than those, such as ignorance, poor communication, and complexity, that would be expected to diminish with access to expertise.

Citation

Finkelstein, Amy, Petra Persson, Maria Polyakova, and Jesse M. Shapiro. 2022. "A Taste of Their Own Medicine: Guideline Adherence and Access to Expertise." American Economic Review: Insights, 4 (4): 507-26. DOI: 10.1257/aeri.20210591

Additional Materials

JEL Classification

  • D82 Asymmetric and Private Information; Mechanism Design
  • D83 Search; Learning; Information and Knowledge; Communication; Belief; Unawareness
  • I11 Analysis of Health Care Markets
  • I12 Health Behavior
  • I18 Health: Government Policy; Regulation; Public Health