Edberg D, Mukhopadhyay S, Wendel J. Incentive design to boost health for juveniles with Medicaid coverage: Evidence from a field experiment.
Econ Hum Biol 2019;
33:101-115. [PMID:
30797161 DOI:
10.1016/j.ehb.2019.01.002]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/12/2018] [Revised: 11/18/2018] [Accepted: 01/10/2019] [Indexed: 06/09/2023]
Abstract
Augmenting incentives for juveniles with separate incentives for parents could boost juvenile efforts to reduce BMI. However, financing a parent incentive by reducing the incentives offered to adolescents could attenuate the juvenile response. In a field experiment, Medicaid-covered juveniles enrolled in a cardiac wellness program were randomly assigned to two groups: juveniles in the focused-incentive group received all earned points; juveniles in the split-incentive group split earned points with a parent. The focused-incentive group was 12.8 percentage points more likely to achieve their stipulated goals compared to the split-incentive group at the end of the 3-month active phase of the program. In contrast, members of the split-incentive group outperformed their peers in the focused-incentive group during the second quarter, and the two incentives structures were equally effective at the year-end session. Additional quasi-experimental data indicates that members of both incentivized groups significantly outperformed (focused-incentive group by 8.48 percentage points and split-incentive group by 11.0 percentage points) a pre-experiment (non-incentivized) set of juveniles enrolled in the same program at year-end.
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