Wharton San Fran Professor to Receive Arrow Award
Assistant Professor Jonathan T. Kolstad from Wharton San Francisco has been awarded the 22nd Arrow Award presented by the International Health Economics Association, for the best paper in health economics. His paper “Information and quality when motivation is intrinsic: evidence from surgeon report cards,” asks whether intrinsic motivation like professional pride is more important than extrinsic motivation like financial rewards in influencing the behavior of health care professionals.
To separate extrinsic and intrinsic incentives for professionals, the paper draws on evidence from the introduction of quality ‘report cards’ for cardiac surgery in Pennsylvania, USA.
Analysis of data on surgeons’ performance, measured by inpatient mortality rates, from the Pennsylvania Health Care Cost Containment Council, shows that when surgeons received new information, that was unrelated to patient demand for their services, the doctors’ intrinsic response was four times larger than the response to financial incentives.
This paper is important to research because clinical specialists, such as surgeons, lie at the heart of the health care system and their decisions shape the allocation of resources within the health care system.
Kolstad came to Wharton in 2009. He received his PhD from Harvard University in 2009 and his Bachelors’ Degree from Stanford University in 2002. In addition to being an Associate Professor of health care management, Kolstad is also a faculty research fellow on the National Bureau of Economic Research since 2011 and also a consulting researcher for Microsoft Research since 2010.
The International Health Economics Association will present the Arrow Award to the authors during a brief ceremony at the AEA meetings in January, 2015.
