{"paper":{"title":"One at a Time? The Personal Productivity Bias in Emergency Department Patient Assignment","license":"http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/","headline":"","cross_cats":["q-fin.EC"],"primary_cat":"econ.GN","authors_text":"Brett Hathaway, Evgeny Kagan, John Jones","submitted_at":"2026-05-22T20:48:19Z","abstract_excerpt":"Emergency departments (EDs) often use a shared-queue setup in which physicians self-assign cases from a pool of triaged patients. We conduct a multi-method study to examine this self-assignment behavior and its effects on system performance. Using data from five EDs spanning 1.4 million patient visits, we show that batching, i.e., self-assigning multiple patients at once, is common and associated with longer stays for batched patients, even after controlling for clinical acuity, physician fixed effects, and ED congestion. We then develop a continuous-time queueing model that characterizes the "},"claims":{"count":0,"items":[],"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"source":{"id":"2605.24208","kind":"arxiv","version":1},"verdict":{"id":null,"model_set":{},"created_at":null,"strongest_claim":"","one_line_summary":"","pipeline_version":null,"weakest_assumption":"","pith_extraction_headline":""},"integrity":{"clean":true,"summary":{"advisory":0,"critical":0,"by_detector":{},"informational":0},"endpoint":"/pith/2605.24208/integrity.json","findings":[],"available":true,"detectors_run":[],"snapshot_sha256":"c28c3603d3b5d939e8dc4c7e95fa8dfce3d595e45f758748cecf8e644a296938"},"references":{"count":0,"sample":[],"resolved_work":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57","internal_anchors":0},"formal_canon":{"evidence_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"author_claims":{"count":0,"strong_count":0,"snapshot_sha256":"258153158e38e3291e3d48162225fcdb2d5a3ed65a07baac614ab91432fd4f57"},"builder_version":"pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1"}