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Working Paper
Demonstration effects in preventive care
Using a unique dataset composed of female employees at a large medical organization, this paper explores the role of social interactions among female co-workers and neighbors in the decision to obtain breast cancer screening exams. In our theoretical framework, the experience of other women is salient because it alters the tolerance for ambiguity about their own vulnerability, via a comparative ignorance effect. We find that the social multiplier ranges from 2 to 3: the equilibrium effect of an exogenous shock that impacts the probability of performing a mammogram is two to three times the ...
Working Paper
Unpacking social interactions
As empirical work in identifying social effects becomes more prevalent, researchers are beginning to struggle with identifying the composition of social interactions within any given reference group. In this paper, we present a simple econometric methodology for the separate identification of multiple social interactions. The setting under which we achieve separation is special, but is likely to be appropriate in many applications.