Information Avoidance and Medical Screening: A Field Experiment in China

Abstract

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 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 anticipatory utility models.