Michael R. Eber successfully defended his dissertation, Essays on Consumer Preferences in Health, as part of the Decision Science Track of the PhD Program in Health Policy at Harvard University. His dissertation advisors were CHDS’ James Hammitt, and Alex Chan and Amitabh Chandra.
The dissertation explored how people perceive value and fairness in health-related choices and policies. Through a series of survey experiments, Eber examined the behavioral drivers of people’s preferences and proposed ways to incorporate these preferences into policy evaluations. His first chapter provided evidence that difficulties in processing numerical risk information can bias economic valuations from stated preference studies and introduces statistical methods to correct for this bias. The second chapter quantified the social value people place on helping individuals in poor health. The final chapter investigated public perceptions of fairness in exclusionary health insurance policies.
This body of work offers actionable insights for policymakers, benefit-cost analysts, and survey researchers working to design and evaluate health policies.
Learn more: Read about the Harvard PhD Program in Health Policy
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