Disclosing Physician Ratings: Attendant Performance Incentives and the Difficulty of Altering Rating Consensus

• In Event: Public Interest & Social Responsibility

Abstract

This study extends empirical research on performance effects of disclosure to the spreading realm of consumer evaluation disclosure. Theory informs how consumer evaluation disclosure may result in the tradeoff of incentivizing performance improvement by the evaluations while establishing an evaluation consensus that is difficult to alter. Variation in physicians’ subjection to a health care system disclosing its consumer evaluations – patient ratings of physicians – during the course of several million visits allows testing for this tradeoff empirically. The disclosure elicits improvement by physician ratings and by undisclosed, objective measures of quality. The disclosure also weighs physician ratings toward previously published values. With greater web traffic, the weight of published values becomes stronger and, counter to intuition in disclosure literature suggesting public attention strengthens disclosure’s performance effects, ratings improvement attenuates. These findings provide initial evidence of a performance tradeoff resulting from consumer evaluation disclosure, and of a context in which public attention is limited in strengthening disclosure’s performance effects.

Author

• Henry Eyring, Harvard Business School