Physicians’ Responses to Incentives and Noise resulting from Artificial Intelligence: A medically framed real effort experiment

Background: Physicians’ behavior can be influenced a number of potential incentives as well as noise. The purpose of the research is to investigate the effects of both financial and non-financial incentives on physicians’ prosocial behavior with the advice of AI in health care settings.
Methods: This study protocol draws on a natural setting to carry out a real effort experiment design of data filling, simulating the process of physicians’ diagnosis and treatment with AI under different incentives. The main task of the subjects is to fill data of abnormal results from paper test report into an input system developed by the software O-Tree in different settings of incentives. We plan to test whether physicians respond differently to financial incentives of different payment systems compared to, or along with the non-financial incentives of quality ranking. Furthermore, our AI-based payment scheme design explores the effects of noise, namely an imperfect AI advise on physician decision making. The main outcome will be the performance of the subjects, including the quantity and quality of data filling, and the subject’s decision making will reflect their tradeoff between the extrinsic and intrinsic motivations.