This survey deals with the economic academic literature on diagnostic tests, with a focus first on the determinants of the use of these tests by healthcare providers, and then on the incentives to develop new diagnostic tests. It is structured in four parts. The first part provides general results in this literature regarding how healthcare providers (mostly, physicians) react to the (explicit or implicit) incentives embedded in existing health institutions, and especially to payment schemes and reimbursement rules. The second part deals more specifically with the incentives to use diagnostic tests including, among them, biomarker tests. Both sections follow a positive approach, describing individual reactions to various incentives. The third section rather takes a normative approach and tries to ascertain which incentives should be given to providers to better use existing diagnostic tests. Finally, the fourth section studies the development of new diagnostic tests, both from the viewpoint of the health authorities (when should they be developed?) and of the industry (how to incentivize them to develop the right kind of test?).
