Nudging consumers in health insurance markets can backfire, doubling welfare loss.
The article explores how hard it is for people to switch health insurance plans and how this affects the quality of plans available. By looking at real data from a big company, the researchers found that switching plans is tough and that people with different health risks tend to choose different plans. They made a model to see how giving people more information about plans could help them make better choices. Surprisingly, they found that when prices of plans change based on who is enrolled, giving more information can actually make things worse by causing more people to pick plans that are not the best for them.