TY - JOUR
T1 - Targeting Using Differential Incentives
T2 - Evidence from a Field Experiment
AU - Acharya, Yubraj
AU - Kim, Jiyoon
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank Edward C. Norton and Dean Yang for providing mentorship throughout this project. We have benefited tremendously from the guidance of Richard A. Hirth, Andrew D. Jones, Jeremy Magruder, an associate editor, and two anonymous reviewers from this journal. Thanks are also due to Qing Zheng, Anup Das, Betsy Cliff, Morris Hamilton, Ryoko Sato, and Dhiraj Sharma as well as seminar participants at the University of Michigan, the 89th Health Economics Study Group meeting in Spain ( June 2016), the Northeast Universities Development Economists Consortium conference in Boston (November 2016), and the International Health Policy Conference in the United Kingdom (February 2017) for comments on earlier analyses. The study would not have materialized without the support received from Dirgha Ghimire and in the field from Prem Pandit, Ramesh Ghimire, Beena Mahato, the late Krishna Ghimire, Bishnu Adhikari, Indra Chaudhary, the Female Community Health Volunteers, and the health posts in charge at the site where this experiment was conducted. We thank them all. All errors in this paper are our own. Acharya acknowledges funding support from four sources at the University of Michigan: Department of Health Management and Policy’s McNerney Award, School of Public Health’s International Travel Award, the Rackham Graduate Student Research Grant, and the Rackham Predoctoral Fellowship. The University of Michigan’s Institutional Review Board and Nepal Health Research Council approved this project. Contact the corresponding author, Yubraj Acharya, at yua36@psu.edu.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2021 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
PY - 2022/1
Y1 - 2022/1
N2 - In a field experiment in Nepal, we varied the amount of financial incentives provided to health outreach workers by the ethnicity of the client they recruited for a free sugar level assessment. We find that our differential incentive in the ratio of 2.5∶1, geared toward encouraging a disadvantaged referral, raises the chances of such a referral by 11.6 percentage points (95% confidence interval, 1.1–22.1). This effect translates to an incentive elasticity of referral of 0.2. There is no evidence that the outreach workers refer less sick individuals to benefit from higher financial incentives; nor do they target fewer overall referrals.
AB - In a field experiment in Nepal, we varied the amount of financial incentives provided to health outreach workers by the ethnicity of the client they recruited for a free sugar level assessment. We find that our differential incentive in the ratio of 2.5∶1, geared toward encouraging a disadvantaged referral, raises the chances of such a referral by 11.6 percentage points (95% confidence interval, 1.1–22.1). This effect translates to an incentive elasticity of referral of 0.2. There is no evidence that the outreach workers refer less sick individuals to benefit from higher financial incentives; nor do they target fewer overall referrals.
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U2 - 10.1086/713883
DO - 10.1086/713883
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:85118778720
SN - 0013-0079
VL - 70
SP - 763
EP - 790
JO - Economic Development and Cultural Change
JF - Economic Development and Cultural Change
IS - 2
ER -