Socio-Economic Determinants and the Role of Information and Salience in Treatment Choice (ABRSEIST)
Antibiotics have contributed to a tremendous increase in human well-being, saving many millions of lives. However, antibiotics become obsolete the more they are used as selection pressure promotes the development of resistant bacteria. The World Health Organization has proclaimed antibiotic resistance as a major global threat to public health. Today, 700,000 deaths per year are due to untreatable infections.
To win the battle against antibiotic resistance, new policies affecting the supply and demand of existing and new drugs must be designed. Hannes Ulrich is principal investigator in the ERC funded research project aiming to identify and evaluate feasible and effective demand-side policy interventions targeting the relevant decision makers: physicians and patients.
ABRSEIST will make use of a broad econometric toolset to identify mechanisms linking antibiotic resistance and consumption exploiting a unique combination of physician-patient-level antibiotic resistance, treatment, and socio-economic data. Using machine learning methods adapted for causal inference, theory-driven structural econometric analysis, and randomization in the field it will provide rigorous evidence on effective intervention designs.
This research will improve our understanding of how prescribing, resistance, and the effect of antibiotic use on resistance, are distributed in the general population which has important implications for the design of targeted interventions. It will then estimate a structural model of general practitioners’ acquisition and use of information under uncertainty about resistance in prescription choice, allowing counterfactual analysis of information-improving policies such as mandatory diagnostic testing. The large-scale and structural econometric analyses allow flexible identification of physician heterogeneity, which ABRSEIST will exploit to design and evaluate targeted, randomized information nudges in the field.
We expect the result to be an improved rational use of antibiotics and a toolset applicable in contexts of antibiotic prescribing.
Researchers
| Name | Title | Job responsibilities | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hannes Ullrich | Associate Professor | Empirical Industrial Organization, Health Economics, Personnel Economics, Discrete Choice |
|
| Michael Allan Ribers | Assistant Professor | Health Economics; Dynamic Discrete Choice; Structural Microeconometrics |
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Funded by:
The project ABRSEIST has received a five year grant from the European Research Council - Starting grants. The Starting grants are designed to support outstanding researchers of any nationality who are starting to develop an independent career of groundbreaking research.
Principal investigator: Hannes Ullrich
Project period: January 2019 - December 2024
Contact
Principal investigator Hannes Ulrich