Substantial practice variation across physicians for seemingly similar patients remains an unresolved puzzle. This paper studies physicians in training to explore the behavioral foundations of practice variation. A discontinuity in the formation of teams reveals a large contribution of relative...

We estimate the effect of physician-patient relationships on clinical decisions in a setting where the treating physician is as good as randomly assigned. OBs are 25% (4 percentage points) more likely to perform a C-section when delivering patients with whom they have a pre-existing clinical...

Studies of team-level constructs can produce new insights when researchers explicitly take into account several critical conceptual and methodological issues. This article explicates the conceptual bases for multilevel research on team constructs and discusses specific issues relating to...

Expert decisions often deviate from evidence-based guidelines. If experts are unaware of guidelines, dissemination may improve outcomes. If experts are aware of guidelines but continue to deviate, promoting stricter adherence has ambiguous effects on outcomes depending on whether experts have...