Publications
Publications
- Journal of the Association for Consumer Research
Motivated Inferences of Price and Quality in Healthcare Decisions
By: Emily Prinsloo, Kate Barasz and Peter A. Ubel
Abstract
Policy makers have increasingly advocated for healthcare price transparency, whereby prices are made salient before services are rendered. While such policies may empower consumers, they also bring price to the forefront of healthcare choices as never before, with yet underexplored consequences on consumers’ decisions. This article explores one: using price as a signal of quality. Five experiments demonstrate how healthcare consumers may come to form price-based inferences of quality and explore how these inferences may vary as a function of individuals’ health insurance coverage. Specifically, relative to high-coverage consumers (for whom insurance covers a relatively greater portion of healthcare expenses), low-coverage consumers (for whom insurance covers relatively less) tend to both choose lower-priced providers and perceive a weaker price-quality relationship, suggestive of motivated reasoning. Our work exposes one way in which price transparency policies may have divergent effects on low- versus high-coverage consumers, with direct implications for policy.
Keywords
Healthcare; Price Transparency; Health Care and Treatment; Price; Quality; Perception; Consumer Behavior; Decisions; Insurance
Citation
Prinsloo, Emily, Kate Barasz, and Peter A. Ubel. "Motivated Inferences of Price and Quality in Healthcare Decisions." Special Issue on Healthcare and Medical Decision Making edited by Dipankar Chakravarti, Jian Ni, Meng Zhu. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research 7, no. 2 (April 2022): 186–197.