David Chan (Stanford Health Policy)
CReAM - Seminar in Applied Economics David Chan (Stanford Health Policy) "Selection with Variation in Diagnostic Skill: Evidence from Radiologists"
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4.00pm - 5.30pm (UK time)
Location: Malet Place Engineering Building 1.03
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About the event

Physicians, judges, teachers, and agents in many other settings differ systematically in the decisions they make when faced with similar cases. Standard approaches to interpreting and exploiting such differences assume they arise solely from variation in preferences. We develop an alternative framework that allows variation in both preferences and diagnostic skill, and show that both dimensions are identified in standard settings under random assignment. We apply this framework to study pneumonia diagnoses by radiologists. Diagnosis rates vary widely among radiologists, and descriptive evidence suggests that a large component of this variation is due to differences in diagnostic skill. Our estimated model suggests that radiologists view false negatives as more costly than false positives, and that this leads less skilled radiologists to optimally choose lower diagnosis thresholds. Variation in accuracy can explain 55 percent of variation in diagnostic decisions, and policies that improve skills perform better than uniform decision guidelines. Misinterpreting skill variation as preference variation can lead to highly misleading results.

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Please check back closer to the event for more details.

Online format and rules
  • The online seminars are held on Zoom and last 75 minutes; 60 minutes are allocated to the seminar and 15 minutes for discussion
  • The online seminars are held on Zoom and last 60 minutes including discussion.
  • The link to each seminar will appear above prior to the start time. Please email h.ku@ucl.ac.uk si.xu.20@ucl.ac.uk if you have not received the password by the day of the seminar.
  • The moderator will collect audience questions in chat or using the 'raise hand' function, but feel free to interrupt the presenter for short questions or clarifications.
  • Please keep your camera on and your microphone off except when asking questions.
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