Financial incentives and gaming in alcohol treatment

The patterns of misreporting are over-reporting of addiction status at the time a client begins a treatment episode, and under-reporting of status at the time of episode termination. [...] Following the MATS protocol, a clinician was to report to MATS at the beginning of a treatment episode, and then again at the end. [...] For each episode, the abstract data include the number of taken visits, their exact dates, whether appointments have been kept, the title of the responsible clinician, and the type of treatment in each visit. [...] The data that are used to construct reduction and abstinence indexes are the alcohol use at admission and at discharge of an episode; both are available from MATS and the medical abstract data sets. [...] The implementation of PBC within the sample period provides us a semi-experimental setting to examine the impact of financial incentives on gaming.1.