My belief, and as we wrote in SuperFreakononomics, is that it’s a question of externalities: the bacteria that a doctor may pass along via poor hand hygiene do not typically damage the doctor him/herself, but rather the next patient down the line. In this sense, deadly bacteria are a lot like our daily pollution: we do not personally pay the cost of our actions, so we have weak incentives to change our behavior.
via freakonomics.blogs.nytimes.com
Apparently I'm not the only one who thinks that prices influence behavior.
