Average willingness to pay for disease prevention with personalized health information

Personal health related information modifies individuals’ willingness to pay for disease prevention programs inasmuch as it allows health status assessment based on intrinsic (instead of average) characteristics. In this paper, we examine the effect that personalized information about the baseline probability of disease has on the average willingness to pay for programs reducing either the probability of disease (self-protection) or the severity of disease (self-insurance). We show that such information raises the average willingness to pay for self-protection while it increases the average willingness to pay for self-insurance if health and wealth are complements (i.e. the marginal utility of wealth rises with health).