TY - JOUR AU - Goldberg, Jessica AU - Macis, Mario AU - Chintagunta, Pradeep TI - Leveraging Patients' Social Networks to Overcome Tuberculosis Underdetection: A Field Experiment in India JF - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series VL - No. 25279 PY - 2018 Y2 - November 2018 DO - 10.3386/w25279 UR - http://www.nber.org/papers/w25279 L1 - http://www.nber.org/papers/w25279.pdf N1 - Author contact info: Jessica Goldberg University of Maryland Department of Economics 3115C Tydings Hall College Park, MD 20742 Tel: (301) 405-3559 E-Mail: goldberg@econ.umd.edu Mario Macis Johns Hopkins University Carey Business School 100 International Drive, Office 1333 Baltimore, MD 21202 Tel: 410/234-9431 Fax: 410/234-9439 E-Mail: mmacis@jhu.edu Pradeep Chintagunta University of Chicago Booth School of Business Chicago, IL E-Mail: pradeep.chintagunta@ChicagoBooth.edu AB - Peer referrals are a common strategy for addressing asymmetric information in contexts such as the labor market. They could be especially valuable for increasing testing and treatment of infectious diseases, where peers may have advantages over health workers in both identifying new patients and providing them credible information, but they are rare in that context. In an experiment with 3,182 patients at 128 tuberculosis (TB) treatment centers in India, we find peers are indeed more effective than health workers in bringing in new suspects for testing, and low-cost incentives of about $US 3 per referral considerably increase the probability that current patients make referrals that result in the testing of new symptomatics and the identification of new TB cases. Peer outreach identifies new TB cases at 25%-35% of the cost of outreach by health workers and can be a valuable tool in combating infectious disease. ER -