Pascaline Dupas

Who they are

Biography beyond the cited work is not recorded, by rule. The 2010 paper's record lists Dupas at UCLA and the National Bureau of Economic Research, the affiliation at the time of the working paper, which may not be current.

She is an economist working on health and development, and the documented footprint used here is three papers: the 2010 bed-net experiment, the 2015 subsidy and targeting study with Cohen and Schaner, and her sole-authored 2014 Econometrica paper.

Key papers

Cohen, J., & Dupas, P. (2010). "Free Distribution or Cost-Sharing? Evidence from a Randomized Malaria Prevention Experiment." Quarterly Journal of Economics, 125(1), 1-45. Second author. Abstract read.

Cohen, J., Dupas, P., & Schaner, S. (2015). "Price Subsidies, Diagnostic Tests, and Targeting of Malaria Treatment: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial." American Economic Review, 105(2), 609-645. Second author. Abstract read.

Dupas, P. (2014). "Short-Run Subsidies and Long-Run Adoption of New Health Products: Evidence From a Field Experiment." Econometrica, 82(1), 197-228. Sole author. Cited by title only; the paper was not read.

Key ideas

The 2010 paper, written with Jessica Cohen, put an old policy argument to a field test. Cost-sharing, charging a subsidised positive price for a health product, is defended on the ground that it avoids waste on people who will not use the product or do not need it. The authors randomised the price of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets sold to pregnant women at prenatal clinics in Kenya.

Their findings run against the belief. Women who received free nets were not less likely to use them than those who paid subsidised positive prices. Women who paid higher prices appeared no sicker than the prenatal clients in the control group, so price did not select for need. And demand fell hard: uptake dropped by 75 per cent when the price rose from nothing to $0.75, the price at which nets were then sold to pregnant women in Kenya. Their cost-effectiveness analysis, which counts the private and social returns to using a net, concluded that free distribution was both more effective and more cost-effective than cost-sharing.

The 2015 study, written with Cohen and Simone Schaner, examined antimalarials sold over the counter. A very high subsidy dramatically increased access, but nearly one half of subsidised pills went to patients without malaria, and the authors examined lower subsidies and rapid malaria tests as ways of targeting better. Read together, the two papers say that the right price for a health product depends on what can go wrong with it. Nets that sit unused do little harm and protect more people when free. Drugs taken without need are a different problem.

Her 2014 paper in Econometrica addresses a further question in the same area, whether a short-run subsidy changes long-run adoption of new health products. Only the title is cited here, because the paper was not read.

For a reader of consumer psychology, the 2010 paper is useful as a check on the laboratory. The chocolate experiments show the pull of a zero price in small choices with little at stake. This experiment shows how demand behaves when the product matters and the price is a real policy. It cannot separate zero from a very low price, because it sets nothing against a single positive price, and the authors do not claim a psychological mechanism in the abstract.

This page was written from abstracts. Sample sizes, tables and the full design were not read and are not reported.

---