Overconfidence and Health Insurance Participation among the Elderly

Wei Huang () and Mi Luo ()
Additional contact information
Wei Huang: National University of Singapore
Mi Luo: New York University

No 9481, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: People may have imperfect information about their health status and thus make suboptimal decisions in insurance participation. Using national representative samples of the elderly in US and China, we find that people with lower socio-economic status and poorer health are relatively less likely to realize how unhealthy they are and this overconfidence is associated with no insurance participation. Accurate health information provided through physical examinations induces relatively higher participation among the overconfident people afterwards. These findings contribute a new explanation for the insufficient participation and advantageous selection in health insurance, and provide new insights on the insurance market and policy suggestions.

Keywords: overconfidence; health; health insurance participation (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: I12 I13 J14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 63 pages
Date: 2015-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-age, nep-cna, nep-hea and nep-ias
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp9481.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp9481

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().