Customer Discrimination and Quality Signals: A Field Experiment with Healthcare Shoppers
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- This paper provides evidence that customer discrimination in the market for doctors can be largely accounted for by statistical discrimination. I evaluate customer preferences in the field with an online platform where cash-paying consumers can shop and book a provider for medical procedures based on an experimental paradigm called validated incentivized conjoint analysis (VIC). Customers evaluate doctor options they know to be hypothetical to be matched with a customized menu of real doctors, preserving incentives. Racial discrimination reduces patient willingness-to-pay for black and Asian providers by 12.7% and 8.7% of the average colonoscopy price. Further, providing signals of provider quality reduces this willingness-to-pay racial gap by about 90% suggesting statistical discrimination as an important cause of the gap. Actual booking behavior allows cross validation of incentive compatibility of stated preference elicitation via VIC.
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Date created | August 13, 2021 |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Chan, Alex |
|---|---|
| Organizer of meeting | Exley, Christine |
| Organizer of meeting | Marquina, Alejandro Martínez |
| Organizer of meeting | Niederle, Muriel |
| Organizer of meeting | Roth, Alvin |
| Organizer of meeting | Vesterlund, Lise |
Subjects
| Subject | economics |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
| Genre | Working paper |
| Genre | Grey literature |
Bibliographic information
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- User agrees that, where applicable, content will not be used to identify or to otherwise infringe the privacy or confidentiality rights of individuals. Content distributed via the Stanford Digital Repository may be subject to additional license and use restrictions applied by the depositor.
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY).
Preferred citation
- Preferred citation
- Chan, A. (2022). Customer Discrimination and Quality Signals: A Field Experiment with Healthcare Shoppers. Stanford Digital Repository. Available at https://purl.stanford.edu/xb098hr2207
Collection
SITE Conference 2021
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