Contract Design and Insurance Demand

Last registered on August 30, 2019
View Trial History

Pre-Trial

Trial Information

General Information

Title
Contract Design and Insurance Demand
RCT ID
AEARCTR-0004641
Initial registration date
August 28, 2019

Initial registration date is when the trial was registered.

It corresponds to when the registration was submitted to the Registry to be reviewed for publication.

First published
August 30, 2019, 10:01 AM EDT

First published corresponds to when the trial was first made public on the Registry after being reviewed.

Locations

Country
China
Region

Primary Investigator

Name
Jing Cai
Affiliation
University of Maryland
Contact Primary Investigator

Other Primary Investigator(s)

Additional Trial Information

Status
On going
Start date
2010-03-01
End date
2019-12-31
Keywords
Agriculture, Finance & Microfinance
Additional Keywords
Insurance, Contract, Context Effect
JEL code(s)
D03, D14, G22, M31, O16, O33, Q12
Secondary IDs
Abstract
This paper uses data from a randomized experiment with around 1700 households in rural China to study the effect on insurance take-up of offering a menu of insurance contracts rather than a single one. Surprisingly, I find that offering more choices increases the take-up rate of the basic contract (lowest premium and payout) by 30%, while only a small proportion of farmers choose contracts with higher premiums and payouts. Information inference explanation is ruled out by the fact that the effect holds even when all farmers are aware of the existence of all contracts. A policy implication is that strategically offering a menu of contracts can be an easy and cheap way to improve insurance take-up.
External Link(s)

Registration Citation

Citation
Cai, Jing. 2019. "Contract Design and Insurance Demand." AEA RCT Registry. August 30. https://doi.org/10.1257/rct.4641-1.0
Sponsors & Partners
Experimental Details

Interventions

Intervention(s)
Intervention Start Date
2010-03-01
Intervention End Date
2011-06-01

Primary Outcomes

Primary Outcomes (end points)
Insurance take-up
Primary Outcomes (explanation)

Secondary Outcomes

Secondary Outcomes (end points)
Secondary Outcomes (explanation)

Experimental Design

Experimental Design
I use a two-year randomized experiment to identify the role of contract design in influencing insurance demand. The experimental site includes 38 randomly selected villages in Jiangxi Province with around 1800 households. The first year experiment was carried out in Spring 2010, including 13 villages with around 560 households. The main intervention is to randomize the menu of insurance contracts offered to farmers. The first year data is used to test the impact of offering different menus of contracts on insurance take-up. The second year experiment was implemented in Spring 2011, with a different set of 25 villages (around 1200 households), in order to identify two different mechanisms of the contract effect: a context effect and an information effect. The second year design includes a 4 by 2 randomizations to identify different mechanisms of the contract effect. First, I randomize four types of contract menus on the household level. In those menus, contracts differ in the level of insurance premium, government subsidy, and maximum payouts. The second randomization is an information treatment. Within each of the four contract groups, half of the households were provided with two additional pieces of information, including the existence of other contracts and the real probability of disasters.
Experimental Design Details
Randomization Method
randomization done in office by a computer
Randomization Unit
Individual
Was the treatment clustered?
No

Experiment Characteristics

Sample size: planned number of clusters
38 villages
Sample size: planned number of observations
2000 households
Sample size (or number of clusters) by treatment arms
500 control, 1500 treated
Minimum detectable effect size for main outcomes (accounting for sample design and clustering)
Supporting Documents and Materials
IRB

Institutional Review Boards (IRBs)

IRB Name
Insurance Take-up and the Impact of Insurance Provision on Agricultural Outcomes
IRB Approval Date
2010-01-01
IRB Approval Number
N/A
Analysis Plan

Post-Trial

Post Trial Information

Study Withdrawal

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Intervention

Is the intervention completed?
No
Data Collection Complete
Data Publication

Data Publication

Is public data available?
No

Program Files

Program Files
Reports, Papers & Other Materials

Relevant Paper(s)

Reports & Other Materials