Teamwork and Moral Hazard: Evidence from the Emergency Department

I investigate how teamwork may reduce moral hazard by joint monitoring and management. I study two organizational systems differing in the extent to which physicians may mutually manage work: Physicians are assigned patients in a nurse-managed system but divide patients between themselves in a self-managed system. The self-managed system increases throughput productivity by reducing a foot-dragging moral hazard, in which physicians prolong patient stays as expected future work increases. I find evidence that physicians in the same location have better information about each other and that, in the self-managed system, they use this information to assign patients.