{"title":"Are physicians rational under ambiguity?","authors":"Yu Gao, Zhenxing Huang, Ning Liu, Jia Yang","doi":"10.1007/s11166-023-09425-z","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Do physicians behave rationally when facing a new disease? This study assesses physicians’ ambiguity attitudes towards the future severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in its early stages and the financial market in the US using an incentive-compatible online experiment. Our findings indicate that physicians demonstrate significant deviations from expected utility, characterized by a modest degree of ambiguity aversion and pronounced levels of likelihood insensitivity. While physicians generally show less insensitivity to uncertainty compared to the general public, both groups exhibited similar levels of irrationality when dealing with the ambiguity surrounding the COVID-19 severity. These results underscore the necessity for debiasing strategies among medical professionals, especially in managing real-world uncertainties, with a specific focus on mitigating likelihood insensitivity.</p>","PeriodicalId":48066,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Risk and Uncertainty","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.3000,"publicationDate":"2024-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Risk and Uncertainty","FirstCategoryId":"96","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1007/s11166-023-09425-z","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"经济学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q3","JCRName":"BUSINESS, FINANCE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Do physicians behave rationally when facing a new disease? This study assesses physicians’ ambiguity attitudes towards the future severity of the COVID-19 pandemic in its early stages and the financial market in the US using an incentive-compatible online experiment. Our findings indicate that physicians demonstrate significant deviations from expected utility, characterized by a modest degree of ambiguity aversion and pronounced levels of likelihood insensitivity. While physicians generally show less insensitivity to uncertainty compared to the general public, both groups exhibited similar levels of irrationality when dealing with the ambiguity surrounding the COVID-19 severity. These results underscore the necessity for debiasing strategies among medical professionals, especially in managing real-world uncertainties, with a specific focus on mitigating likelihood insensitivity.
期刊介绍:
The Journal of Risk and Uncertainty (JRU) welcomes original empirical, experimental, and theoretical manuscripts dealing with the analysis of risk-bearing behavior and decision making under uncertainty. The topics covered in the journal include, but are not limited to, decision theory and the economics of uncertainty, experimental investigations of behavior under uncertainty, empirical studies of real world risk-taking behavior, behavioral models of choice under uncertainty, and risk and public policy. Review papers are welcome.
The JRU does not publish finance or behavioral finance research, game theory, note length work, or papers that treat Likert-type scales as having cardinal significance.
An important aim of the JRU is to encourage interdisciplinary communication and interaction between researchers in the area of risk and uncertainty. Authors are expected to provide introductory discussions which set forth the nature of their research and the interpretation and implications of their findings in a manner accessible to knowledgeable researchers in other disciplines.
Officially cited as: J Risk Uncertain