EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Social Networks and the Decision to Insure

Jing Cai, Alain de Janvry (alain@berkeley.edu) and Elisabeth Sadoulet (esadoulet@berkeley.edu)

MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany

Abstract: Using data from a randomized experiment in rural China, this paper studies the influence of social networks on weather insurance adoption and the mechanisms through which social networks operate. To quantify network effects, the experiment offers intensive information sessions about the insurance product to a random subset of farmers. For untreated farmers, the effect of having an additional treated friend on take-up is equivalent to granting a 15% reduction in the insurance premium. By varying the information available about peers’ decisions and using randomized default options, the experiment shows that the network effect is driven by the diffusion of insurance knowledge rather than purchase decisions.

Keywords: Social network; Insurance demand; Learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D12 D83 G22 O33 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-05-09
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp, nep-ias, nep-ict, nep-net, nep-soc and nep-ure
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (33)

Downloads: (external link)
https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/46861/1/MPRA_paper_46861.pdf original version (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Social Networks and the Decision to Insure (2015) Downloads
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:pra:mprapa:46861

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in MPRA Paper from University Library of Munich, Germany Ludwigstraße 33, D-80539 Munich, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Joachim Winter (winter@lmu.de).

 
Page updated 2024-12-28
Handle: RePEc:pra:mprapa:46861