Description:

Speaker: Zincy Wei

Title: The Political-Economic Determinants of Choosing Traditional Medicine in India

Abstract: Traditional medicine is widely used in low- and middle-income developing countries, despite limited medical evidence supporting its effectiveness compared to modern medicine. This project investigates the political and economic determinants of choosing traditional medicine in India. I design a field survey to document and measure people's beliefs and behaviors in healthcare choices. Preliminary pilot results suggest that patients who exclusively use traditional medicine hold low trust in the Indian healthcare system despite supporting the in-power party. Low take-up modern medicine rate is not driven by price sensitivity, but persistent and strongly motivated beliefs on the effectiveness of traditional treatment. These results hold regardless of the patient's socioeconomic background and diseases they treat. Next, I plan to conduct a field experiment to test whether intense competition of medical practices is crowding out patients' trust in medicines, and resulting in sorting of choosing medicine. The experimental design will focus on proposing cost-effective policies to overcome this market failure.

Title: Quality Provision with Decision Frictions: Evidence from the Indian Pharmaceutical Sector

Abstract: How do demand-side constraints - characterized by consumers' decision frictions - influence supply-side incentives for quality provision in a limited disclosure environment? In this paper, I propose a novel hypothesis: demand frictions limit firms’ ability to build reputation locally, incentivizing firms to shift toward improving quality provision in the global market instead, resulting in quality provision sorting across products and markets. I investigate this in the Indian pharmaceutical sector. I first design a consumer survey to systematically document decision frictions - consumers' strong branded preference across products (at the molecule level) and markets (at the disease level). I then utilize aggregated drug sales data linked to the U.S. FDA to measure market structure and quality provision outcomes. Leveraging experimental variations, I plan to estimate a structural model that quantifies the role of demand-side frictions in shaping supply side quality provision behaviors.