This paper takes advantage of a natural experiment to examine the relationship between the price and saliency of health services. A large employer e-mailed individually-targeted health education encouraging high-value care to high-risk employees. Weeks before the program launched, a company reorganization affecting about a quarter of employees resulted in that group not receiving the intervention. Using event study, difference-in-differences, and triple differences methods, I find that costlier services are associated with relatively less utilization and that prior use was associated with relatively more utilization following the campaigns. These results may inform employer, governmental, and health insurer choices concerning low-cost interventions seeking to shift health behaviors, and may also be relevant in other settings in which targeted informational nudges are deployed.
We use cookies to provide you with an optimal website experience. This includes cookies that are necessary for the operation of the site as well as cookies that are only used for anonymous statistical purposes, for comfort settings or to display personalized content. You can decide for yourself which categories you want to allow. Please note that based on your settings, you may not be able to use all of the site's functions.
Cookie settings
These necessary cookies are required to activate the core functionality of the website. An opt-out from these technologies is not available.
In order to further improve our offer and our website, we collect anonymous data for statistics and analyses. With the help of these cookies we can, for example, determine the number of visitors and the effect of certain pages on our website and optimize our content.