Advertising in Health Insurance Markets
利用电视市场边界造成的广告暴露不连续性，估计电视广告对健康保险消费者选择的影响，发现广告对品牌注册影响小且效果短暂，对不健康县更有效，与“撇脂”担忧相反。
The effects of television advertising in the market for health insurance are of distinct interest to both firms and regulators. Regulators are concerned about firms potentially using ads to “cream skim,” or attract an advantageous risk pool, as well as the potential for firms to use misinformation to take advantage of the elderly. Firms are interested in using advertising to acquire potentially highly profitable seniors. Meanwhile, health insurance is a useful setting to study the mechanisms through which advertising could work. Using the discontinuity in advertising exposure created by the borders of television markets, this study estimates the effects of advertising on consumer choice in health insurance. Television advertising has a small effect on brand enrollments, making advertising a relatively expensive means of acquiring customers. Heterogeneous effects point to advertising being more effective in less healthy counties, which runs opposite to the concern of cream skimming. Leveraging the unilateral cessation of advertising by United-Healthcare, evidence is provided that the small advertising effect is not explained by a prisoner’s dilemma equilibrium. An analysis of longer-run effects of advertising shows that advertising effects are short lived, further decreasing the potential of advertising to create long-run value to the firm.