Risky Business: Measuring the Impact of Introversion, Extraversion, and Risk Aversion on Individual and Joint Decision Making

Decision making is a rich field of study explored across multiple disciplines in a variety of settings. One specific area that has received a great deal of attention is financial decision making, most notably Kahneman and Tversky’s (1979) work on psychological patterns affecting risk aversion in individuals. There are, however, areas yet unexplored, including the role of personality, group composition, as well as emotion regulation. This study seeks to explore these concepts. To accomplish this, an experimental approach was utilized to test risk aversion levels of individuals and partners in their financial decision making. Introversion, extraversion, emotion regulation, anger, and stress, were also accounted for. Overall, results were mixed but did demonstrate promise that emotion regulation, anger, introversion and extraversion were factors in financial decision making

The effect of financial incentives on weight loss: Documentation of data from a randomized experiment

This data report documents the individual-level dataset of a randomized experiment to test whether obese people are more likely to reduce weight when receiving financial incentives. The experiment, conducted between March 2010 and July 2013, comprises 700 obese medical rehabilitation patients who were assigned to one of three experimental groups for achieving an individual target weight within four months after staying in a rehabilitation clinic in the federal state of Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany. Participants in the two treatment groups were paid premiums of different amounts for achieving their individual target weight, while individuals assigned to the control group received no such premium. The experimental design enables to control for a range of socio-economic and healthrelated characteristics of the individuals

Does Hospital Reputation Influence the Choice of Hospital?

A number of recent empirical studies document significant effects of in-patient care quality indicators on the choice of hospital. These studies use either objective quality indicators based on quantitative figures, or if subjective reputation scores are used, scores based on the opinion of hospital market insiders. We contribute to the current debate by using a subjective reputation score resorting to patient perceptions and examine its impact on the choice of hospital of patients undergoing a coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) in Germany. Our results show that 76% of the patients value hospital reputation positively when choosing a hospital. Moreover, we find evidence for a trade-off between hospital reputation and travel time, i.e. a significant share of patients is willing to accept additional travel time to get a treatment in a hospital with better reputation. The average marginal effect for hospital reputation confirms this finding, since the magnitude of the effect strengthens for higher thresholds of travel time. The results are robust for different degrees of co-morbidities and admission status.Eine Reihe jüngst veröffentlichter empirischer Studien hat nachgewiesen, dass Qualitätsindikatoren einen signifikanten Einfluss auf die Krankenhauswahl haben. Diese Studien haben entweder objektive Qualitätsindikatoren herangezogen, die auf quantitativen Größen beruhen, oder sofern subjektive Indikatoren herangezogen wurden, basierten diese auf der Meinung von Krankenhausmarktinsidern. Mit dieser Studie leisten wir einen Beitrag zur aktuellen Debatte, indem wir als Indikator die Reputation von Krankenhäusern verwenden, die auf der Meinung von ehemals behandelten Patienten basiert, und untersuchen dessen Einfluss auf die Krankenhauswahl von Patienten, die sich einer Koronararterien-Bypass-Operation in Deutschland unterzogen haben. Unsere Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die Reputation der Klinik bei 76 Prozent aller Patienten einen signifikanten Einfluss auf die Krankenhauswahl hat. Darüber hinaus finden wir empirische Evidenz für einen Trade-off zwischen Reputation und der Fahrzeit zum Klinikum. Ein signifikanter Anteil der Patienten ist folglich bereit, längere Fahrzeiten in Kauf zu nehmen, um in einer Klinik mit besserer Reputation behandelt zu werden. Die durchschnittlichen marginalen Effekte bestätigen diesen Befund insofern, als dass die Größenordnung des marginalen Effekts für Krankenhausreputation für längere Fahrzeiten stetig zunimmt. Die Ergebnisse sind robust für verschiedene Schweregrade und den Aufnahmestatus des Patienten

An Egocentric Network Contact Tracing Experiment: Testing Different Procedures to Elicit Contacts and Places

Contact tracing is one of the oldest social network health interventions used to reduce the diffusion of various infectious diseases. However, some infectious diseases like COVID-19 amass at such a great scope that traditional methods of conducting contact tracing (e.g., face-to-face interviews) remain difficult to implement, pointing to the need to develop reliable and valid survey approaches. The purpose of this research is to test the effectiveness of three different egocentric survey methods for extracting contact tracing data: (1) a baseline approach, (2) a retrieval cue approach, and (3) a context-based approach. A sample of 397 college students were randomized into one condition each. They were prompted to anonymously provide contacts and populated places visited from the past four days depending on what condition they were given. After controlling for various demographic, social identity, psychological, and physiological variables, participants in the context-based condition were significantly more likely to recall more contacts (medium effect size) and places (large effect size) than the other two conditions. Theoretically, the research supports suggestions by field theory that assume network recall can be significantly improved by activating relevant activity foci. Practically, the research contributes to the development of innovative social network data collection methods for contract tracing survey instruments

Privately owned hospitals - 2015

The privatisation of hospitals, i.e. a change in their type of ownership from the municipal and private non-profit type to the private profit-oriented type, has been the subject of heated debate ever since this development began back in the early 1990s. To objectivise this debate, the Fact Books "Significance of Privately Owned Hospitals' were prepared in 2009 and 2012 using data from 2006 and 2009, respectively. The aim was to provide a sound and reasoned assessment of hospital privatisation in Germany by presenting and evaluating relevant key ratios relating to the hospital market, differentiated by type of ownership. The present Fact Book, now in its third edition, has set out to update the analyses performed in 2006 and 2009 to the current data basis from 2012/13. A further aim is to address current debates relating to emergency care and the use of nurses in hospitals. Lastly, the authors wish in particular to shed light on the hospital reform slated for 2015, including both the problem of sustainable investment financing for hospitals and the subject of quality in the hospital