Description: This article provides an overview of behavioral economic theory as it relates to health and welfare insurance plans and provides summaries of two sample applications of the theories: enrollment in health insurance exchanges created by the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, and product design considerations in light of vast health illiteracy.

Description: A review of the academic article "Health Insurance for ‘Humans’: Information Frictions, Plan Choice, and Consumer Welfare."

Description: A summary of the driving forces behind, and effects of, the historical increases and future expectations of Generic Dispensing Rates.

Description: The Behavioral Finance subgroup of the Health Section will be publishing a series of literature reviews in Health Watch. This is the first review of three in the series. The reviewed article describes an attempt to place an econometric value on consumers’ preferences between broad and narrow networks.

Description: New research shows that we often make sub-optimal choices, when selecting a health insurance plan, that lead to unnecessary out-of-pocket expenditu

Description: This article describes seven results from behavioral finance that actuaries may find useful: heuristics, the endowment effect, loss aversion, prospect theory, satisficing, strategic thinking and agent-based modeling.

Description: Introduces the new behavioral finance subgroup and talks about why such a subgroup is needed.