Information Avoidance and Medical Screening: A Field Experiment in China
通过在中国开展实地实验，研究人们是否会因信息规避而拒绝疾病检测，发现即使免费也有部分人回避检测，且价格上升时低风险和高风险人群都会退出。
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.