>The medical professional is greedy, i.e. they want to charge you as much money as possible, and they do not (per se) care about your health. They only care about your health as far as they can get money from you.
I'm not even going to read the rest of the article because the premise up front is so flawed. It assumes that doctors alone have say over pricing / compensation, and that's just not reality. It's much like engineers being blamed for things that rest entirely with management. It also makes the same flawed premise that I deal with in my profession every day - that I'm so greedy and so focused on my own pocketbook that I will screw over my clients. Are people motivated by money? Certainly. But a professional will put their client above money assuming no other perverse incentives.
This article was really trying to illustrate game theory concepts with a story about greedy doctors, but it was unfortunately framed as if it's trying to solve a greedy doctor problem using game theory. It might have fared better using different analogies.
This comment is like saying that Zeno’s paradox is dumb because proud Achilles would never consent to a foot race with a mere turtle - imagine the insult!
It's not that you're wrong, it's that what you write only addresses the title of and first sentences of the article, rather than anything the article is actually trying to say.
This article is about game-theoretical-ideas of how to deal with the principal-agent problem. The "greedy doctor" idea is just a motivating example. You're seemingly taking offense at a knowingly fictional setup. That's akin to not wanting to learn how to solve physics problems about objects in a world where friction is assumed away, because that's not realistic. Umm, what?
I'm not even going to read the rest of the article because the premise up front is so flawed. It assumes that doctors alone have say over pricing / compensation, and that's just not reality. It's much like engineers being blamed for things that rest entirely with management. It also makes the same flawed premise that I deal with in my profession every day - that I'm so greedy and so focused on my own pocketbook that I will screw over my clients. Are people motivated by money? Certainly. But a professional will put their client above money assuming no other perverse incentives.