Information Avoidance and Medical Screening: A Field Experiment in China

Will individuals, especially high-risk individuals, avoid a disease test because of information avoidance? We conduct a field experiment to investigate this issue. We vary the price of a diabetes test (price experiment) and offer both a diabetes test and a cancer test (disease experiment) after eliciting participants’ subjective beliefs about their disease risk. We find evidence that, first, some people avoid the test even when there is neither a monetary nor a transaction cost, and second, both low- and high-risk individuals select out of the test as the price increases. We explain our findings using three classes of models of anticipatory utility. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

• 저널Management Science · 67(7) · 4252–4272
• 토픽Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics · General Decision Sciences
• DOI10.1287/mnsc.2020.3723
• 저자Yufeng Li, Juanjuan Meng, Changcheng Song, Kai Zheng