Date and Time
July 2, 2003
1:30 PM - 3:30 PM

Availability
Open to the public
No RSVP required

Speaker
Jay Bhattacharya - Assistant Professor at CHP/PCOR, Stanford University

Secondary life insurance markets are growing rapidly, diffusing beyond sales to HIV patients alone. From nearly no transactions in 1980, a wide variety of similar products in this market has developed, including viatical settlements, accelerated death benefits, and life settlements and as the population ages, these markets will become increasingly popular. Bhattacharya presents evidence from these markets that participants make systematic mistakes caused by misperceptions in their own mortality risk and mistaken heuristic rules. Price regulations designed to correct for these mistakes, however, fail to improve market outcomes and in fact impose significant costs on a group of people (HIV patients) who can ill afford it.