Healthcare AI for Automation or Allocation? A Transaction Cost Economics Framework

Computer Science > Artificial Intelligence [Submitted on 8 Apr 2026] Healthcare AI for Automation or Allocation? A Transaction Cost Economics Framework Ari Ercole Healthcare productivity is shaped not only by clinical complexity but by the costs of coordinating work under uncertainty. Transaction-cost economics offers a theory of these coordination frictions, yet has rarely been operationalised at task level across health occupations. Using task statements and frequency weights from the O*NET occupational database, we characterised healthcare work at task granularity and coded each unique task using a constrained large language model into one dominant transaction-cost category (information search, decision and bargaining, monitoring and enforcement, or adaptation and coordination) together with an overall transaction-cost intensity score. Aggregating to the occupation level, clinician roles exhibited substantially higher transaction-cost intensity than non-clinician roles, driven primarily by greater burdens of information search and decision-related coordination, while dispersion of transaction costs within occupations did not differ. These findings demonstrate systematic heterogeneity in the nature of coordination work across healthcare roles and suggest that the opportunities for digital and AI interventions are unevenly distributed, shaped less by technical task complexity than by underlying coordination structure. Subjects: Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); General Economics (econ.GN) Cite as: arXiv:2604.16465 [cs.AI]   (or arXiv:2604.16465v1 [cs.AI] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.16465 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Ari Ercole [view email] [v1] Wed, 8 Apr 2026 18:22:46 UTC (59 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.AI < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs econ econ.GN q-fin q-fin.EC References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)