To Charge or Not to Charge: Evidence from a Health Products Experiment in Uganda

Margaret McConnell, Dean Karlan, Greg Fischer and Pia Raffler

No 9999, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: In a field experiment in Uganda, a free distribution of three health products lowers subsequent demand relative to a sale distribution. This contrasts with work on insecticide-treated bed nets, highlighting the importance of product characteristics in determining pricing policy. We put forward a model to illustrate the potential tension between two of these important factors, learning and anchoring, and then test this model with three products selected specifically for their variation in the scope for learning. We find the rank order of percentage change of shifts in demand matches theoretical predictions, although the differences are not statistically significant, and only two of three pairwise comparisons match when the reductions are specified in percent terms. These results highlight the importance of understanding pricing policy with respect to product, market, and household characteristics.

Keywords: Health; Learning; Pricing; Subsidies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D11 D12 D83 I11 I18 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014-06
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (18)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9999 (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:
Working Paper: To Charge or Not to Charge: Evidence from a Health Products Experiment in Uganda (2014)
Working Paper: To Charge or Not to Charge: Evidence from a Health Products Experiment in Uganda (2014)
Working Paper: To Charge or Not to Charge: Evidence from a Health Products Experiment in Uganda (2014)
Working Paper: To Charge or Not to Charge: Evidence from a Health Products Experiment in Uganda (2014)
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:9999

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP9999

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 ().