Comparison Friction: Experimental Evidence from Medicare Drug Plans

Jeffrey R. Kling, Sendhil Mullainathan, Eldar Shafir, Lee Vermeulen, Marian Wrobel

NBER Working Paper No. 17410
Issued in September 2011

---- Acknowledgements -----

The views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as those of the Congressional Budget Office or the National Bureau of Economic Research. A previous version of this analysis was circulated under the title “Misperception in Choosing Medicare Drug Plans.” This project was supported by Ideas42, a social science research and development laboratory, and we are grateful to Fred Doloresco, Magali Fassiotto, Santhi Hariprasad, Marquise McGraw, Garth Wiens, and Sabrina Yusuf for research assistance. We thank Phil Ellis, Don Green, Jacob Hacker, Justine Hastings, Ori Heffetz, Larry Kocot, David Laibson, Kristina Lowell, Mark McClellan, Richard Thaler, and numerous seminar participants for helpful discussions. We also thank CVS Caremark Corporation and Experion Systems (www.planprescriber.com) for sharing data. We gratefully acknowledge funding for this work provided by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Changes in Health Care Financing and Organization Initiative, the University of Chicago’s Defining Wisdom Project and the John Templeton Foundation, and the National Institute on Aging (P01 AG005842).

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