title: What is the price of prevention? New evidence from a field experiment.
abstract: How does increasing access to treatment affect the demand for preventive testing? In this paper we present results from a field experiment in Nigeria in which we offered cervical cancer screening to women at randomly chosen prices. To test our hypothesis, we also offered women a lottery where the payoff was a subsidy towards the cost of cervical cancer treatment (conditional upon a diagnosis of cervical cancer). We find that women randomly selected to receive the conditional cancer treatment subsidy were about 4 percentage points more likely to take up screening than those in the control group. We also show that reducing the price of screening by 10 cents increased take-up by about 1 percentage point. These results offer compelling evidence that the optimal set of subsidies to increase take-up of preventive testing in developing countries, must include subsidies towards treatment costs (in addition to price subsidies).
authors.affiliation: RAND, Santa Monica, USA. eokeke@rand.org
authors.forename: Edward N
authors.initials: EN
authors.lastname: Okeke
authors.forename: Clement A
authors.initials: CA
authors.lastname: Adepiti
authors.forename: Kayode O
authors.initials: KO
authors.lastname: Ajenifuja
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D055088:Early Detection of Cancer / Q000191:economics* / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D005249:Fees and Charges; D005260:Female; D005380:Financing, Government; D006297:Health Services Accessibility / Q000191:economics / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D006801:Humans; D008875:Middle Aged; D018803:Models, Economic; D009549:Nigeria / Q000453:epidemiology; D002583:Uterine Cervical Neoplasms / Q000175:diagnosis* / Q000191:economics / Q000628:therapy; D055815:Young Adult