An experimental study on the effect of co-payment in public services

Aurora García-Gallego, Nikolaos Georgantzís (), Tarek Jaber-López and Gianandrea Staffiero

Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), 2016, vol. 65, issue C, 109-116

Abstract: This paper aims to shed light on the impacts of imposing co-payment on public services, a strategy increasingly employed in the realm of publicly provided healthcare. We analyze the effect of imposing a charge for the individual appropriation of common resources. In our design, withdrawing the maximum amount is the dominant strategy for every player, but the resulting equilibrium is socially inefficient. We find that the presence of a price that is small enough to leave intact the conflict between individual incentives and collective welfare is not effective in reducing appropriation among agents who have previously been acting without it. In fact, the upward trend in the average extraction of common funds continues after the introduction of a price. In an alternative treatment in which we impose copayment from the outset of the experiment, withdrawals are lower than in the free-access baseline. Our results provide insights on the conditions for the effectiveness of co-payment in curbing the over-consumption of public resources.

Keywords: Common-pool resources; Co-payment; Public services; Consumer choice (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C91 C92 H41 I11 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

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Working Paper: An experimental study on the effect of co-payment in public services (2016)
Working Paper: An experimental study on the effects of co-payment in public services (2013)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:soceco:v:65:y:2016:i:c:p:109-116

DOI: 10.1016/j.socec.2016.08.002

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