Surviving Bad News: Health Information without Treatment Options

Alberto Ciancio, Fabrice Kampfen, Hans-Peter Kohler and Rebecca Thornton

American Economic Review: Insights, 2025, vol. 7, issue 1, 1-18

Abstract: When there is no treatment available for a life-threatening disease, providing personal health information could lead to despair or fatalistic behaviors resulting in negative health outcomes. We document this possibility utilizing an experiment in Malawi that randomized incentives to learn HIV testing results in a context where antiretroviral treatment was not yet available. Six years after the experiment, among HIV-positive individuals, those who learned their status were 23 percentage points less likely to survive than those who did not, with effects persisting after 15 years. Receiving an HIV-positive diagnosis resulted in riskier health behaviors, greater anxiety, and higher discount rates.

JEL-codes: D83 D91 I12 I18 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aeri.20240058 (application/pdf)
https://doi.org/10.3886/E204883V1 (text/html)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aeri.20240058.appx (application/pdf)
https://www.aeaweb.org/doi/10.1257/aeri.20240058.ds (application/zip)
Access to full text is restricted to AEA members and institutional subscribers.

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:aea:aerins:v:7:y:2025:i:1:p:1-18

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.aeaweb.org/journals/subscriptions

DOI: 10.1257/aeri.20240058

Access Statistics for this article

American Economic Review: Insights is currently edited by Amy Finkelstein

More articles in American Economic Review: Insights from American Economic Association Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Michael P. Albert ().