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We look forward to welcoming Prof. Dr. Chenyuan Liu, Assistant Professor of Economics at the School of Economics and Management at Tsinghua University, to the University of St. Gallen, where she will present her paper, «The Downside of More: Choice Overload in Health Insurance Market».
Prof. Dr. Chenyuan Liu received her Ph.D. in Risk and Insurance from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 2020, and her undergraduate degree from the University of Hong Kong in 2015. Her research lies at the intersection of health economics and industrial organization, with a focus on health insurance design and pharmaceutical markets. Her work has been published or is forthcoming in journals including the American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, RAND Journal of Economics, Review of Economics and Statistics, and the Journal of Health Economics.
Abstract: Health insurance markets often offer multiple plans, yet consumers frequently choose strictly dominated options. Using two natural experiments in China’s private health insurance market, we study how choice set size affects choice quality. An insurer exogenously expanded renewal menus from two to three plans and later reduced them back to two. Exploiting strictly dominated plans and a regression discontinuity design, we find that adding one option increases dominated choices by 8.4 percentage points (52%), while removing one reduces them by 11.0 points (49%). Evidence points to choice overload rather than changes in average plan quality as the main reason.