To test or not to test? Risk attitudes and prescribing by French GPs.

Summary Risk is a key dimension of economic decisions, but whether risk attitudes can predict real economic behaviour is still subject to investigation. We measure general practitioners' (GPs) risk attitudes and check for a relationship with variations in prescribing practices. Individual-level risk attitudes are elicited from simple survey choices on a representative national panel of 939 French GPs, and are linked to their volume of lab-test prescriptions through administrative records. Specifically, we estimate individual components of a flexible decision model under risk (rank-dependent utility) using random-coefficient estimations, and then treat these components as predictors of observed lab-test prescribing. We find that (1) GPs exhibit the usual patterns of risk attitudes: risk aversion and inverse S-shaped probability weighting prevails (2) risk aversion captured by the utility function is positively correlated with lab-test prescribing.