Essays on Asymmetric Information in Health Care and Consumer Credit Card Lending Markets
Open Access
- Author:
- Xiang, Jia
- Graduate Program:
- Economics
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- April 17, 2020
- Committee Members:
- Daniel Jose Grodzicki, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Daniel Jose Grodzicki, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Mark John Roberts, Committee Member
Peter William Newberry, Committee Member
Lisa Lipowski Posey, Outside Member
Paul L E Grieco, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Marc Albert Henry, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Asymmetric Information
Credit Lending
Health Care
Welfare
Adverse Selection - Abstract:
- I empirically investigate the welfare consequences of asymmetric information in the context of physician-patient interaction in medical treatment decisions and consumers’ adverse selection in credit card lending. In chapter 1, with health insurance claims data for a large district in China, I empirically show that physicians respond to their financial incentives, using their informational advantage to influence patients’ treatment choices. Difference-in-Differences analysis shows that, for a diagnosis for which surgical treatment is somewhat discretionary, surgery were chosen nearly three times as often after an increase in physicians’ remuneration differential between surgical and non-surgical treatment, with no change in health outcomes. The effect was 1.5 times larger for more insured patients. Chapter 2 first characterizes the physician-patient interaction formally using a Bayesian persuasion framework and test the model’s main implications. I then estimate a parameterized version of the model to calculate the value of fully informing patients about the relative value of treatment options. Over half of the surgery patients would not have done so were they fully informed, whereby total welfare rises by 89 percent. In chapter 3, by analyzing unique data from a randomized balance transfer market experiment in the U.S., I show that conditional on price, higher risk types are more willing to take up an offer.The annual welfare loss due to adverse selection is estimated to be at least $12 per U.S. credit cardholder. In addition, the FICO score captures 90 percent of the welfare loss due to adverse selection.