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"It is well known that public or pooled insurance coverage can induce a form of ex-ante moral hazard: people make inefficiently low investments in self-protective activities. This paper points out another ex-ante moral hazard that arises through an induced innovation externality. This alternative mechanism, by contrast, causes people to devote an inefficiently high level of self-protection. As an empirical example of this externality, we analyze the innovation induced by the obesity epidemic. Obesity is associated with an increase in the incidence of many diseases. The induced innovation hypothesis is that an increase in the incidence of a disease will increase technological innovation specific to that disease. The empirical economics literature has produced substantial evidence in favor of the induced innovation hypothesis.We first estimate the associations between obesity and disease incidence. We then show that if these associations are causal and the pharmaceutical reward system is optimal the magnitude of the induced innovation externality of obesity roughly coincides with the Medicare-induced health insurance externality of obesity. The current Medicare subsidy for obesity therefore appears to be approximately optimal. We also show that the pattern of diseases for obese and normal weight individuals are similar enough that the induced innovation externality of obesity on normal weight individuals is positive as well"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site

"In the contingent valuation literature, both anchoring and acquiescence biases pose problems when using an iterative bidding game to infer willingness to pay. Anchoring bias occurs when the willingness to pay estimate is sensitive to the initially presented starting value. Acquiescence bias occurs when survey respondents exhibit a tendency to answer 'yes' to questions, regardless of their true preferences. More generally, whenever a survey format is used and not all of those contacted participate, selection bias raises concerns about the representativeness of the sample. In this paper, we estimate students' willingness to pay for student health care at Stanford University while accounting for all of these biases. As there is no cost sharing for students, we assess willingness to pay by having a random sample of students play an online iterative bidding game. Our main results are that (1) demand for student health care is elastic by conventional standards; (2) ignoring anchoring bias would lead to a substantially biased measure of the demand elasticity; (3) there is evidence for acquiescence bias in student answers to the opening question of the iterative bidding game and failure to address this leads to the biased conclusion that demand is inelastic; and (4) standard selection correction methods indicate no bias from selective non-response and newer bounding methods support this conclusion of elastic demand"--National Bureau of Economic Research web site