Genetic Information: Comparing Alternative Regulatory Approaches when Prevention Matters

Francesca Barigozzi and Dominique Henriet

CHILD Working Papers from CHILD - Centre for Household, Income, Labour and Demographic economics - ITALY

Abstract: We compare the alternative approaches for regulating genetic information in the health insurance market when prevention measures are available. In the model, firms offer insurance contracts to consumers who are initially uninformed of their risk type but can obtain such information by performing a costless genetic test. A crucial ingredient of our analysis is that information has decision-making value since it allows for optimal choice of a self-insurance action (secondary prevention). We focus on the welfare properties of market equilibria obtained under the different regulatory schemes and, by using an intuitive graphical analysis, we rank them unambiguously. Our results show that Disclosure Duty weakly dominates the other regulatory schemes and that Strict Prohibition represents the worst regulatory approach.

Keywords: health insurance markets; information gathering; discrimination risk; classification risk; self-insurance (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D82 D83 G22 L52 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 31 pages
Date: 2008-12
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cta, nep-hea, nep-ias and nep-reg
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Related works:
Journal Article: Genetic Information: Comparing Alternative Regulatory Approaches When Prevention Matters (2011)
Working Paper: Genetic Information: Comparing Alternative Regulatory Approaches when Prevention Matters (2009)
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:wpc:wplist:wp01_09

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