On Inferring Demand for Health Care in the Presence of Anchoring and Selection Biases

Bhattacharya Jay () and Isen Adam ()
Additional contact information
Bhattacharya Jay: Stanford University and NBER
Isen Adam: University of Pennsylvania

Forum for Health Economics & Policy, 2009, vol. 12, issue 2, 24

Abstract: In the contingent valuation literature, anchoring bias poses problems when using an iterative bidding game to infer willingness to pay. This bias occurs when the willingness to pay estimate is sensitive to the initially presented starting value. More generally, whenever a survey format is used and not all of those contacted participate, selection bias raises concerns about the representativeness of the sample. In this paper, we estimate students' willingness to pay for student health care at Stanford University while accounting for both of these biases. As there is no cost sharing for students, we assess willingness to pay by having a random sample of students play an on line iterative bidding game. Our main results are that (1) demand for student health care is elastic by conventional standards; (2) ignoring anchoring bias would lead to a substantially biased measure of the demand elasticity; and (3) standard selection correction methods indicate no bias from selective non-response and newer bounding methods support this conclusion of elastic demand.

Keywords: contingent valuation; anchoring bias; sample selection bias; student health; cost sharing (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.2202/1558-9544.1152 (text/html)
For access to full text, subscription to the journal or payment for the individual article is required.

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:bpj:fhecpo:v:12:y:2009:i:2:n:6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://www.degruyte ... ournal/key/fhep/html

DOI: 10.2202/1558-9544.1152

Access Statistics for this article

Forum for Health Economics & Policy is currently edited by Dana Goldman

More articles in Forum for Health Economics & Policy from De Gruyter
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Peter Golla ().