Can a Circular Payment Card Format Effectively Elicit Preferences? Evidence From a Survey on a Mandatory Health Insurance Scheme in Tunisia

Background The choice of elicitation format is a crucial but tricky aspect of stated preferences surveys. It affects not only the quantity and quality of the information collected on respondents’ willingness to pay (WTP) but also the potential errors/biases that prevent their true WTP from being obs...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied health economics and health policy 2017-06, Vol.15 (3), p.385-398
Main Authors: Chanel, Olivier, Makhloufi, Khaled, Abu-Zaineh, Mohammad
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bids
Consumer Behavior - statistics & numerical data
Econometrics
Economic models
Economics and Finance
Errors
Female
Financing, Personal - economics
Financing, Personal - statistics & numerical data
Health Administration
Health care industry
Health care policy
Health Economics
Health Expenditures - statistics & numerical data
Health insurance
Humanities and Social Sciences
Humans
Income distribution
Insurance, Health - economics
Insurance, Health - statistics & numerical data
Male
Medical screening
Medicine
Medicine & Public Health
Original Research Article
Pharmacoeconomics and Health Outcomes
Polls & surveys
Public Health
Quality of Life Research
Reimbursement Mechanisms
Representation
Respondents
Studies
Surveys and Questionnaires
Tunisia
Valuation
Willingness to pay
Citations: Items that this one cites
Items that cite this one
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Background The choice of elicitation format is a crucial but tricky aspect of stated preferences surveys. It affects not only the quantity and quality of the information collected on respondents’ willingness to pay (WTP) but also the potential errors/biases that prevent their true WTP from being observed. Objectives We propose a new elicitation mechanism, the circular payment card (CPC), and show that it helps overcome the drawbacks of the standard payment card (PC) format. It uses a visual pie chart representation without start or end points: respondents spin the circular card in any direction until they find the section that best matches their true WTP. Methods We performed a contingent valuation survey regarding a mandatory health insurance scheme in Tunisia, a middle-income country. Respondents were randomly allocated into one of three subgroups and their WTP was elicited using one of three formats: open-ended (OE), standard PC and the new CPC. We compared the elicited WTP. Results We found significant differences in unconditional and conditional analyses. Our empirical results consistently indicated that the OE and standard PC formats led to significantly lower WTP than the CPC format. Conclusion Overall, our results are encouraging and suggest CPC could be an effective alternative format to elicit ‘true’ WTP.
ISSN:1175-5652
1179-1896
DOI:10.1007/s40258-016-0287-5