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  • 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
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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.
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More from the Authors

    • November 2022
    • Psychological Science

    Opportunity Neglect: An Aversion to Low-probability Gains

    By: Emily Prinsloo, Kate Barasz, Leslie K. John and Michael I. Norton
    • 2021
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    Consumer Disclosure

    By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie John
    • Behavioural Public Policy

    Unhealthy Consumerism: The Challenge of Trading Off Price and Quality in Healthcare

    By: Kate Barasz and Peter A. Ubel
More from the Authors
  • Opportunity Neglect: An Aversion to Low-probability Gains By: Emily Prinsloo, Kate Barasz, Leslie K. John and Michael I. Norton
  • Consumer Disclosure By: Tami Kim, Kate Barasz and Leslie John
  • Unhealthy Consumerism: The Challenge of Trading Off Price and Quality in Healthcare By: Kate Barasz and Peter A. Ubel
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