Pathologies in Customer Behavior on Medical Services Market

The beginning of the 21st Century is characterized by significant acceleration of various types of changes in the world, especially in Central and Easter European markets (Mruk 2007, p. 9). These changes generate important influence on customer/patient of medical market and may have both positive and negative effect on their behavior, which has been well demonstrated in the recent global economic crisis. It is worth noting that the current crisis is of a system character and spreads as a result of correlations which are typical of the globalization process (Kolodko 2009, p. 2). Difficulties caused by the crisis across the whole economy, mounted by constant transformation processes, often result in various social problems including alcoholism, drug addiction, crime, divorce, suicide mental and civilization diseases, social care and education failure, abuse in the family, etc. Hence, it can be stated that the rate of changes in the developing economies is bigger than consumers' awareness of the ongoing changes and their ability to grasp the processes. The emerging disintegrative processes are reflected in the consumer market behavior and leads to a phenomenon of consumers' negative adaptation to this reality. Systematically, consumers tend to take a more liberal approach towards phenomena that only recently were considered negative or even pathological. In these circumstances, customer behavior pathologyrelated issues on the medical market present one of the most interesting, both theoretically and practically, economic subjects. That is why the purpose of the paper was to identify pathologies in patients' behavior on medical market. Very important purpose of the paper was to characterize determinant which diversification pathological behavior of patients on medical market. To reach the above-presented purposes, a survey was conducted with the use of a structured questionnaire in Poland, Romania and Ukraine.