The trickle of business method patents issued by the United States Patent Office became a flood after the State Street Bank decision in 1998. Many scholars, both legal and economic, have critiqued both the quality of these patents and the decision itself. This paper discusses the likely impact...

We re-present and re-examine the analysis from the famous RAND Health Insurance Experiment from the 1970s on the impact of consumer cost sharing in health insurance on medical spending. We begin by summarizing the experiment and its core findings in a manner that would be standard in the current...

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....

This paper studies regulated health insurance markets known as exchanges, motivated by their inclusion in the Affordable Care Act (ACA). We use detailed health plan choice and utilization data to model individual-level projected health risk and risk preferences. We combine the estimated joint...

We use unique data from an insurer that exclusively offers high-deductible, "consumer-directed" health plans to identify the effect of plan features, notably the spending account, on health care spending. Our results show that the marginal dollar in the spending account is entirely spent on...

Medicare Part D provides prescription drug coverage through Medicare approved plans offered by private insurance companies and HMOs. In this paper, we study the role of current prescription drug use and health risks, related expectations, and subjective factors in the demand for prescription...

Algorithms are increasingly available to help consumers make purchasing decisions. How does algorithmic advice affect human decisions and what types of consumers are likely to use such advice? We conducted a randomized, controlled trial comparing the effects of offering personalized information,...

We examine how consumers respond to being effectively double insured under two systems: group health (GH) and workers' compensation (WC). Many GH plans have substantial consumer cost-sharing burden, while WC coverage has no cost-sharing for medical services for work-related injuries. As a...

Insurance product choice is a central feature of health insurance markets in the United States, yet there is ongoing concern over whether consumers choose appropriately in such markets – and little evidence on solutions to any choice inconsistencies. This paper addresses these omissions from...

Recent years have seen enormous growth in limited network plans that restrict patient choice of provider, particularly through state exchanges under the ACA. Opposition to such plans is based on concerns that restrictions on provider choice will harm patient care. We explore this issue in the...