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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Economic analysis of prevention : prevention supply, incentives and preferences in french private medical practice

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The traditional approach of the economics of prevention is built around a demand-side logic. This provides fruitful insights about consumer behaviour and public policies related to prevention, but it has nothing to say about the supply side of prevention. The present thesis aims at developing the economics of prevention from the supply-side, in particular the production of services by ambulatory physicians, and to study the incentives to prevention and the preferences of these medical care producers. An institutional analysis enables to underline the obstacles limiting the supply of prevention by French doctors, and shows that it is necessary to develop incentives mechanisms to increase this supply, particularly if a fee-for-service payment predominates in the remuneration of the doctor. The analysis of incentives to prevention reveals that a pay-for-performance payment is effective if subjected to conditions. It also demonstrates that incentives may not be exclusively of a monetary nature: non financial and organizational incentives are also efficient mechanisms. However, the efficiency of the various incentives depends on the motivations of doctors and on how they regard these incentive instruments. We empirically examine these perceptions by revealing the general practitioners’ preferences for the incentive mechanisms. An innovative approach of economic evaluation, namely a discrete choice experiment, is used in a survey. The econometric treatment of the collected data provides results which highlight the complexity and heterogeneity of the suppliers’ preferences. These results contribute to the reflection on the modelling of the behaviour of physicians and on the public policies designed to encourage the supply of prevention in medical care.