Facilitating Consumer Learning in Insurance Markets?What Are the Welfare Effects?

Johan Lagerlof and Schottmüller, Christoph
Authors registered in the RePEc Author Service: Christoph Schottmüller

No 9753, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: What are the welfare effects of a policy that facilitates for insurance customers to privately and covertly learn about their accident risks? We endogenize the information structure in Stiglitz's classic monopoly insurance model. We first show that his results are robust: For a small information acquisition cost c, the consumer gathers information and the optimal contracts are close to the ones in the Stiglitz model. If c is so low that the consumer already gathers information (cc*, marginally reducing c hurts the insurer and weakly benefits the consumer. Paradoxically, a reduction in c that is ?successful,? meaning that the consumer gathers information after the reduction but not before it, can hurt both parties. The reasons for this are that, after the reduction, (i) the cost is actually incurred and (ii) the contracts can be more distorted.

Keywords: Adverse selection; Asymmetric information; Information acquisition; Insurance; Screening (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 I13 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-com and nep-cta
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9753 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Facilitating Consumer Learning in Insurance Markets: What Are the Welfare Effects? (2018)
Working Paper: Facilitating Consumer Learning in Insurance Markets - What Are the Welfare Effects? (2013)
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:cpr:ceprdp:9753

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9753

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().