We examine cost-plus lagged-price reimbursement contracts, focusing on Medicare Part B's payment for physician-administered drugs. Our theoretical model shows that lagged-price reimbursement can raise launch prices but lower prices in later periods. While previous research showed Part B...

Shareholders want a firm's objective function to place some weight on consumer welfare, motivated by both self-interested and altruistic motivations. Firms have a unique technology for improving consumer welfare: lowering inefficient price markups, which increases consumer welfare more than it...

Fragmented healthcare received from many different physicians results in higher costs and lower quality, but does it contribute to dangerous opioid prescribing? The effect is theoretically ambiguous because fragmentation can trigger costly coordination failures but also permits greater...

Economics research has largely overlooked non-binary individuals. We aim to jump-start the literature by providing data on several economically-important beliefs and preferences. Among many results, non-binary individuals report more gender-based discrimination and express different career and...

Administrative barriers to social insurance program take-up are pervasive, including in subsidized health insurance. We conducted a randomized controlled trial with Massachusetts' Affordable Care Act marketplace to reduce these barriers and other behavioral frictions. We find that a "check the...

Foresightful workers can take actions to reduce their exposure to risk in labor markets, but existing evidence on narrow bracketing suggests that individuals might not optimally integrate risk reduction decisions with subsequent labor decisions. In an online labor market, we vary the level of...

Standardization of complex products is touted as improving consumer decisions and intensifying price competition, but evidence on standardization is limited. We examine a natural experiment: the standardization of health insurance plans on the Massachusetts Health Insurance Exchange....

We analyze consumer demand and model the effect of pricing regulation under imperfect competition using data from the Massachusetts health insurance exchange. We identify consumer demand using coarse insurer pricing strategies. There is substantial heterogeneity in preferences by consumer type,...

Prices negotiated between payers and providers affect a health insurance contract's value via enrollees' cost-sharing and self-insured employers' costs. However, price variation across payers is hard to observe. We measure negotiated prices for hospital-payer pairs in Massachusetts and...

Demand for insurance can be driven by high risk aversion or high risk. We show how to separately identify risk preferences and risk types using only choices from menus of insurance plans. Our revealed preference approach does not rely on rational expectations, nor does it require access to...