The facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) of a person is associated with dominance and leadership. Our research examines the extent to which a perceiver’s political orientation biases their judgment of a political candidate’s electability based on the candidate’s facial characteristics, and stereotypes associated with the gender of the candidate. Four studies suggest that although fWHR is positively correlated with dominance evaluations of male faces, the same attribution is less likely to be made for female faces. Furthermore, political conservatives show stronger bias than liberals against female faces and are also less likely to elect female candidates associated with lower dominance. Finally, although liberals show greater intentions to vote for females than for males, high fWHR has little effect on voters’ perceptions of females’ electability regardless of their political orientation.
{"title":"The Face of Political Beliefs: Why Gender Matters for Electability","authors":"Ahreum Maeng, P. Aggarwal","doi":"10.1086/719579","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719579","url":null,"abstract":"The facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) of a person is associated with dominance and leadership. Our research examines the extent to which a perceiver’s political orientation biases their judgment of a political candidate’s electability based on the candidate’s facial characteristics, and stereotypes associated with the gender of the candidate. Four studies suggest that although fWHR is positively correlated with dominance evaluations of male faces, the same attribution is less likely to be made for female faces. Furthermore, political conservatives show stronger bias than liberals against female faces and are also less likely to elect female candidates associated with lower dominance. Finally, although liberals show greater intentions to vote for females than for males, high fWHR has little effect on voters’ perceptions of females’ electability regardless of their political orientation.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"360 - 370"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46071677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
T he healthcare market has been changing rapidly since the new millennium, creating a need for a new, integrated perspective on consumer relevant healthcare topics through the lens of psychology, marketing, and economics (Wood 2018; Iacobucci 2019). Even though marketing and consumer researchers with both quantitative and qualitative orientations have recently joined forces to tackle these emerging topics, healthcare and medical decision making remain understudied substantive areas. The goal of the current special issue was to stimulate high-quality scholarly articles focusing on contemporary issues in healthcare and medical decision making from both consumer research and marketing science perspectives in order to advance our understanding of consumer, firm, and regulatory choices and their interactive impact on healthcare markets and relevant public policy. In this editorial, we first review the evolution of healthcare ecosystems, followed by a summary of extantmarketing literature addressing healthcare issues. We then propose a consumer-centric and pluralistic methodological approach that we hope will advance the corpus on research in marketing that examines healthcare and medical decision making. Next, we summarize the nine articles included in this special issue and highlight the novel insights that they contribute. We concludewith a discussion of future directions and priorities in healthcare marketing and decision-making research.
{"title":"Emerging Marketing Research on Healthcare and Medical Decision Making: Toward a Consumer-Centric and Pluralistic Methodological Perspective","authors":"Meng Zhu, Dipankar Chakravarti, Jian Ni","doi":"10.1086/719268","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/719268","url":null,"abstract":"T he healthcare market has been changing rapidly since the new millennium, creating a need for a new, integrated perspective on consumer relevant healthcare topics through the lens of psychology, marketing, and economics (Wood 2018; Iacobucci 2019). Even though marketing and consumer researchers with both quantitative and qualitative orientations have recently joined forces to tackle these emerging topics, healthcare and medical decision making remain understudied substantive areas. The goal of the current special issue was to stimulate high-quality scholarly articles focusing on contemporary issues in healthcare and medical decision making from both consumer research and marketing science perspectives in order to advance our understanding of consumer, firm, and regulatory choices and their interactive impact on healthcare markets and relevant public policy. In this editorial, we first review the evolution of healthcare ecosystems, followed by a summary of extantmarketing literature addressing healthcare issues. We then propose a consumer-centric and pluralistic methodological approach that we hope will advance the corpus on research in marketing that examines healthcare and medical decision making. Next, we summarize the nine articles included in this special issue and highlight the novel insights that they contribute. We concludewith a discussion of future directions and priorities in healthcare marketing and decision-making research.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"133 - 141"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2022-01-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44031871","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
nMarch 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. In an attempt to capture real-time insights on consumer behavior during the unprecedented months that followed, the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (JACR) issued a Call for Papers in April 2020 for a Flash COVID-19 Research Issue. We received a record-breaking 138 submissions, and from those 20 empirical papers were accepted for publication. These 20 articles appear in print in two separate issues of JACR—six papers in the COVID-19 Supplemental Issue in January 2021 (vol. 6, no. 1), and 14 papers in a dedicated COVID-19 Flash Issue in January 22 (vol. 7, no. 1). The research covers a wide range of topics—from how government handles the pandemic, to people’s willingness to comply with different preventive measures to protect the self, to consumers’ perceptions of different product offerings and their consumption behaviors during the pandemic, to preference on how scarce life-saving resources should be allocated, and far beyond. In the Supplemental Issue, we reflected on these insights in an editorial titled “A View from Inside: Insights on Consumer Behavior during a Global Pandemic” (Goldsmith and Lee 2021). This title was a metaphorical nod to the fact that these insights were gathered inside what we believed would be the worst of the pandemic, and a literal nod to the fact that many were, at the time, sheltering in place inside their homes. We had hoped that this follow-up editorial might be titled “A View from Beyond,” reflecting back on these findings with greater psychological distance from the pandemic. However, COVID-19 is still a consideration in our daily lives. As of this writing, 20 months after the WHO’s declaration, 249 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide, with more than five million deaths (https://www .worldometers.info/coronavirus/). Most experts believe an
{"title":"Looking Back and Looking Forward: (Re)Interpreting Consumer Insights in a Time of Transition","authors":"Angela Y. Lee, Kelly Goldsmith","doi":"10.1086/718146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718146","url":null,"abstract":"nMarch 11, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the novel coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak a global pandemic. In an attempt to capture real-time insights on consumer behavior during the unprecedented months that followed, the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (JACR) issued a Call for Papers in April 2020 for a Flash COVID-19 Research Issue. We received a record-breaking 138 submissions, and from those 20 empirical papers were accepted for publication. These 20 articles appear in print in two separate issues of JACR—six papers in the COVID-19 Supplemental Issue in January 2021 (vol. 6, no. 1), and 14 papers in a dedicated COVID-19 Flash Issue in January 22 (vol. 7, no. 1). The research covers a wide range of topics—from how government handles the pandemic, to people’s willingness to comply with different preventive measures to protect the self, to consumers’ perceptions of different product offerings and their consumption behaviors during the pandemic, to preference on how scarce life-saving resources should be allocated, and far beyond. In the Supplemental Issue, we reflected on these insights in an editorial titled “A View from Inside: Insights on Consumer Behavior during a Global Pandemic” (Goldsmith and Lee 2021). This title was a metaphorical nod to the fact that these insights were gathered inside what we believed would be the worst of the pandemic, and a literal nod to the fact that many were, at the time, sheltering in place inside their homes. We had hoped that this follow-up editorial might be titled “A View from Beyond,” reflecting back on these findings with greater psychological distance from the pandemic. However, COVID-19 is still a consideration in our daily lives. As of this writing, 20 months after the WHO’s declaration, 249 million cases of COVID-19 have been reported worldwide, with more than five million deaths (https://www .worldometers.info/coronavirus/). Most experts believe an","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"1 - 7"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48023941","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Although modern medical practice emphasizes the importance of empowering consumers to participate in medical decisions, consumers often report having less say than they desire. Three experiments demonstrate that increasing the fluency with which medical decisions are communicated can increase participation: consumers were more likely to participate in medical treatment decisions (vs. delegate to a medical professional) when information about their options was presented in a fluent (vs. disfluent) format. Fluency increases participation by increasing subjective comprehension (i.e., by making people feel like they better understand the choice and feel more confident in their ability to choose), independent of objective comprehension. The effect of fluency was strongest among consumers with inadequate health literacy and under time pressure and persisted regardless of past experience. Together, these studies suggest that policies aimed at making medical information easier to process can empower consumers to participate in decisions regarding their health.
{"title":"Empowering Consumers to Engage with Health Decisions: Making Medical Choices Feel Easy Increases Patient Participation","authors":"Mary Steffel, Elanor F. Williams, Stephan Carney","doi":"10.1086/718455","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718455","url":null,"abstract":"Although modern medical practice emphasizes the importance of empowering consumers to participate in medical decisions, consumers often report having less say than they desire. Three experiments demonstrate that increasing the fluency with which medical decisions are communicated can increase participation: consumers were more likely to participate in medical treatment decisions (vs. delegate to a medical professional) when information about their options was presented in a fluent (vs. disfluent) format. Fluency increases participation by increasing subjective comprehension (i.e., by making people feel like they better understand the choice and feel more confident in their ability to choose), independent of objective comprehension. The effect of fluency was strongest among consumers with inadequate health literacy and under time pressure and persisted regardless of past experience. Together, these studies suggest that policies aimed at making medical information easier to process can empower consumers to participate in decisions regarding their health.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"154 - 163"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45226291","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Inbal Harel, Marcus Mayorga, P. Slovic, Tehila Kogut
The disparity between the number of patients awaiting organ transplantation and organ availability increases each year. One of the chief obstacles to organ donation is religiosity. We examine the role of religiosity and other related beliefs in organ-donation decisions among Christians (studies 1 and 3) and Jews (study 2). In all samples, we found a significant interaction between religiosity and the salience of a religious context, manipulated by the order of the questions, such that religiosity (and specifically, extrinsic religion) was significantly associated with lower support for organ donations—but only when religious attitudes were elicited first, not when support for organ donation, or questions about other beliefs (study 3) appeared first. We examine possible mechanisms underlying this effect and discuss theoretical and practical implications of this finding to increase support for organ donations in both personal and policy decisions.
{"title":"Is Religiosity a Barrier to Organ Donations? Examining the Role of Religiosity and the Salience of a Religious Context on Organ-Donation Decisions","authors":"Inbal Harel, Marcus Mayorga, P. Slovic, Tehila Kogut","doi":"10.1086/718459","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718459","url":null,"abstract":"The disparity between the number of patients awaiting organ transplantation and organ availability increases each year. One of the chief obstacles to organ donation is religiosity. We examine the role of religiosity and other related beliefs in organ-donation decisions among Christians (studies 1 and 3) and Jews (study 2). In all samples, we found a significant interaction between religiosity and the salience of a religious context, manipulated by the order of the questions, such that religiosity (and specifically, extrinsic religion) was significantly associated with lower support for organ donations—but only when religious attitudes were elicited first, not when support for organ donation, or questions about other beliefs (study 3) appeared first. We examine possible mechanisms underlying this effect and discuss theoretical and practical implications of this finding to increase support for organ donations in both personal and policy decisions.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"235 - 245"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42386008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Angela Y. Lee, Jiaqian Wang, U. Böckenholt, Leonard Lee, R. Ohme, Dorota Reykowska, Catherine Yeung
Addressing vaccine hesitancy has taken on a new sense of urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy research examines demographic correlates of vaccination intent, which could lead to a suboptimal one-size-fits-all strategy. This research aims to offer insights into COVID-19 vaccination promotion by conducting segmentation analyses using psychological and behavioral factors that may correlate with vaccination uptake. The results of two US-based studies identified six segments that differ in perceptions, attitudes, concerns, and behaviors related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The segments also differ in vaccination intent (study 1) and actual vaccination rate (study 2), with different factors driving vaccination intent/rates. The implication is that targeted interventions are warranted to increase vaccine uptake. Recommendations on how policy makers may design different interventions and locate the relevant segments to encourage vaccine uptake are discussed.
{"title":"The Enthusiasts and the Reluctants of COVID-19 Vaccine Uptake: A Cluster Analysis","authors":"Angela Y. Lee, Jiaqian Wang, U. Böckenholt, Leonard Lee, R. Ohme, Dorota Reykowska, Catherine Yeung","doi":"10.1086/718458","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718458","url":null,"abstract":"Addressing vaccine hesitancy has taken on a new sense of urgency during the COVID-19 pandemic. Most COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy research examines demographic correlates of vaccination intent, which could lead to a suboptimal one-size-fits-all strategy. This research aims to offer insights into COVID-19 vaccination promotion by conducting segmentation analyses using psychological and behavioral factors that may correlate with vaccination uptake. The results of two US-based studies identified six segments that differ in perceptions, attitudes, concerns, and behaviors related to the COVID-19 pandemic. The segments also differ in vaccination intent (study 1) and actual vaccination rate (study 2), with different factors driving vaccination intent/rates. The implication is that targeted interventions are warranted to increase vaccine uptake. Recommendations on how policy makers may design different interventions and locate the relevant segments to encourage vaccine uptake are discussed.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"222 - 234"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49517560","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Peggy Liu, J. Inman, Beibei Li, Charlene Wong, Nathan Yang
The digital age is transforming consumer health. Yet digital health technologies are often researched, developed, marketed, and used without focusing on how they fit within a broader framework. We present a consumer-centric 3×3 framework wherein the digital age introduces three key affordances (personalization, interactivity, and information transparency), which can shape patient behavior within and bridging across three patient journey stages (preclinic, in-clinic, and postclinic). We then delineate a future research agenda leveraging this framework. Overall, this article thus provides an organizing structure and agenda for understanding consumer health in the digital age.
{"title":"Consumer Health in the Digital Age","authors":"Peggy Liu, J. Inman, Beibei Li, Charlene Wong, Nathan Yang","doi":"10.1086/718457","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718457","url":null,"abstract":"The digital age is transforming consumer health. Yet digital health technologies are often researched, developed, marketed, and used without focusing on how they fit within a broader framework. We present a consumer-centric 3×3 framework wherein the digital age introduces three key affordances (personalization, interactivity, and information transparency), which can shape patient behavior within and bridging across three patient journey stages (preclinic, in-clinic, and postclinic). We then delineate a future research agenda leveraging this framework. Overall, this article thus provides an organizing structure and agenda for understanding consumer health in the digital age.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"198 - 209"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44804271","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
We use Swedish data on consumer choices of therapeutically equivalent drugs to measure the zero-price effect. The Swedish benefit scheme for prescription drugs is a tier system, where each patient’s copay share is a step function of his/her qualified accumulated expenditure and can ultimately drop to zero. The copay tier a patient falls into is exogenously determined by his/her health and drug needs. In any given month, a patient pays the copay share of the lowest priced drug, plus the price difference between the chosen drug and the lowest priced drug in the same therapeutically equivalent exchange group. Therefore, when consumers cross the threshold of the zero-copay tier, the net price for the lowest priced drug will switch from a small positive amount to zero. This unique quasi-random environment allows us to apply the regression discontinuity design to quantify the zero-price effect. We do so for the full sample, as well as for two subsamples that should be less affected by state dependence. Based on a linear (quadratic) specification, the estimated zero-price effect reduces choice shares of the noncheapest alternatives by 12% (13%), 39% (48%), and 23% (25%) in the full sample, new diagnoses sample, and switchers sample, respectively.
{"title":"Quantifying the Zero-Price Effect in the Field: Evidence from Swedish Prescription Drug Choices","authors":"Andrew T. Ching, David Granlund, David Sundström","doi":"10.1086/718460","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718460","url":null,"abstract":"We use Swedish data on consumer choices of therapeutically equivalent drugs to measure the zero-price effect. The Swedish benefit scheme for prescription drugs is a tier system, where each patient’s copay share is a step function of his/her qualified accumulated expenditure and can ultimately drop to zero. The copay tier a patient falls into is exogenously determined by his/her health and drug needs. In any given month, a patient pays the copay share of the lowest priced drug, plus the price difference between the chosen drug and the lowest priced drug in the same therapeutically equivalent exchange group. Therefore, when consumers cross the threshold of the zero-copay tier, the net price for the lowest priced drug will switch from a small positive amount to zero. This unique quasi-random environment allows us to apply the regression discontinuity design to quantify the zero-price effect. We do so for the full sample, as well as for two subsamples that should be less affected by state dependence. Based on a linear (quadratic) specification, the estimated zero-price effect reduces choice shares of the noncheapest alternatives by 12% (13%), 39% (48%), and 23% (25%) in the full sample, new diagnoses sample, and switchers sample, respectively.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"1133 1","pages":"175 - 185"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41279161","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Lay perceptions of medical conditions and treatments determine people’s health behaviors, guide biomedical research funding, and have important consequences for both individual and societal well-being. Yet it has been nearly impossible to quantitatively predict lay health perceptions for hundreds of everyday diseases due to the myriad psychological forces governing health-related attitudes and beliefs. Here we present a data-driven approach that uses text explanations on healthcare websites, combined with large-scale survey data, to train a machine learning model capable of predicting lay health perception. We use our model to analyze how language influences health perceptions, interpret the psychological underpinnings of health judgment, and quantify differences between different descriptions of disease states. Our model is accurate, cost-effective, and scalable and offers researchers and practitioners a new tool for studying health-related attitudes and beliefs.
{"title":"Machine Learning Models for Predicting, Understanding, and Influencing Health Perception","authors":"Ada Aka, Sudeep Bhatia","doi":"10.1086/718456","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718456","url":null,"abstract":"Lay perceptions of medical conditions and treatments determine people’s health behaviors, guide biomedical research funding, and have important consequences for both individual and societal well-being. Yet it has been nearly impossible to quantitatively predict lay health perceptions for hundreds of everyday diseases due to the myriad psychological forces governing health-related attitudes and beliefs. Here we present a data-driven approach that uses text explanations on healthcare websites, combined with large-scale survey data, to train a machine learning model capable of predicting lay health perception. We use our model to analyze how language influences health perceptions, interpret the psychological underpinnings of health judgment, and quantify differences between different descriptions of disease states. Our model is accurate, cost-effective, and scalable and offers researchers and practitioners a new tool for studying health-related attitudes and beliefs.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"142 - 153"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47806099","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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.
{"title":"Motivated Inferences of Price and Quality in Healthcare Decisions","authors":"Emily Prinsloo, Kate Barasz, P. Ubel","doi":"10.1086/718452","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1086/718452","url":null,"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.","PeriodicalId":36388,"journal":{"name":"Journal of the Association for Consumer Research","volume":"7 1","pages":"186 - 197"},"PeriodicalIF":2.6,"publicationDate":"2021-12-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43946241","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
京公网安备 11010802042870号
京ICP备2023020795号-1
扫码关注我们
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：