IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/ssb/dispap/334.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Willingness to Pay for Dental Fear Treatment. Is Supplying Fear Treatment Socially Beneficial?

Author

Listed:

Abstract

The aim of this paper is to discuss the social desirability of a treatment program for patients with dental fear. The program consisted of three different fear treatments, cognitive therapy, applied relaxation or nitrous oxide sedation, as well as dental treatment. To evaluate the effects of uncertainty on the patients' benefits from the program, we elicit their willingness to pay both before and after receiving treatment, since we expected patients to be uncertain about the outcome of the fear treatment. We find that the social desirability of the treatment is very sensitive towards uncertainty. While only 24 percent of the patients were willing to pay the actual cost of the treatment before attending, 71 percent were willing to pay afterwards. This implies that many patients who would benefit from the treatment ex post are not willing to pay the cost of the treatment ex ante, and will thus not receive any treatment unless it is subsidised.

Suggested Citation

  • Bente Halvorsen & Tiril Willumsen, 2002. "Willingness to Pay for Dental Fear Treatment. Is Supplying Fear Treatment Socially Beneficial?," Discussion Papers 334, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
  • Handle: RePEc:ssb:dispap:334
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://www.ssb.no/a/publikasjoner/pdf/DP/dp334.pdf
    Download Restriction: no
    ---><---

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Bente Halvorsen, 1996. "Ordering effects in contingent valuation surveys," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 8(4), pages 485-499, December.
    2. Myles,Gareth D., 1995. "Public Economics," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521497695, October.
    3. Zinde-Walsh, Victoria, 1995. "ESTIMATION AND INFERENCE IN ECONOMETRICSRussell Davidson and James G. MacKinnon Oxford University Press, 1993," Econometric Theory, Cambridge University Press, vol. 11(3), pages 631-635, June.
    4. Johansson,Per-Olov, 1993. "Cost-Benefit Analysis of Environmental Change," Cambridge Books, Cambridge University Press, number 9780521447928, October.
    5. Bente Halvorsen, 2000. "Comparing Ranking and Contingent Valuation for Valuing Human Lives, Applying Nested and Non-Nested Logit Models," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 17(1), pages 1-19, September.
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Bente Halvorsen & Tiril Willumsen, 2004. "Willingness to pay for dental fear treatment," The European Journal of Health Economics, Springer;Deutsche Gesellschaft für Gesundheitsökonomie (DGGÖ), vol. 5(4), pages 299-308, November.
    2. Johansson, Per-Olov & Kriström, Bengt, 2012. "On a New Approach to Social Evaluations of Environmental Projects," CERE Working Papers 2012:4, CERE - the Center for Environmental and Resource Economics.
    3. Bente Halvorsen, 2004. "Effects of norms, warm-glow and time use on household recycling," Discussion Papers 389, Statistics Norway, Research Department.
    4. Jose Apesteguia & Miguel Ballester, 2009. "A theory of reference-dependent behavior," Economic Theory, Springer;Society for the Advancement of Economic Theory (SAET), vol. 40(3), pages 427-455, September.
    5. Pierre-Pascal Gendron, 1996. "Corporation Tax Asymmetries: An Oligopolistic Supergame Analysis," Working Papers ecpap-96-04, University of Toronto, Department of Economics.
    6. Lin, Shuanglin, 2008. "China's value-added tax reform, capital accumulation, and welfare implications," China Economic Review, Elsevier, vol. 19(2), pages 197-214, June.
    7. Medin, Hege & Nyborg, Karine & Bateman, Ian, 2001. "The assumption of equal marginal utility of income: how much does it matter?," Ecological Economics, Elsevier, vol. 36(3), pages 397-411, March.
    8. Chorvat, Terrence, 2006. "Taxing utility," Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics (formerly The Journal of Socio-Economics), Elsevier, vol. 35(1), pages 1-16, February.
    9. Bente Halvorsen, 2009. "Conflicting Interests in Environmental Policy-making?," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 44(2), pages 287-305, October.
    10. Roberto José Arias, 2004. "Reglas de selección para la fiscalización de Impuestos a las Ventas," Revista de Economía y Estadística, Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Facultad de Ciencias Económicas, Instituto de Economía y Finanzas, vol. 42(2), pages 29-62, Diciembre.
    11. Bjarne S. Jensen, 2004. "Pareto Efficiency, Relative Prices, and Solutions to CGE Models," DEGIT Conference Papers c009_006, DEGIT, Dynamics, Economic Growth, and International Trade.
    12. Celia Bilbao-Terol, 2009. "Impacts of an Iron and Steel Plant on Residential Property Values," European Planning Studies, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 17(9), pages 1421-1436, September.
    13. Stina Hökby & Tore Söderqvist, 2003. "Elasticities of Demand and Willingness to Pay for Environmental Services in Sweden," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 26(3), pages 361-383, November.
    14. Carbonell-Nicolau, Oriol & Llavador, Humberto, 2018. "Inequality reducing properties of progressive income tax schedules: the case of endogenous income," Theoretical Economics, Econometric Society, vol. 13(1), January.
    15. Ginés de Rus, 2014. "The economic evaluation of infrastructure investment. Some inescapable tradeoffs," Working Papers 2014-16, FEDEA.
    16. Johansson-Stenman, Olof & Carlsson, Fredrik & Daruvala, Dinky, 2001. "Measuring Hypothetical Grandparents Preferences For Equality And Relative Standings," Working Papers in Economics 42, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    17. Arnott, Richard & Shevyakhova, Elizaveta, 2014. "Tenancy rent control and credible commitment in maintenance," Regional Science and Urban Economics, Elsevier, vol. 47(C), pages 72-85.
    18. Lilia Maliar & Serguei Maliar, 2005. "An Analytical Construction Of Constantinides¿ Social Utility Function," Working Papers. Serie AD 2005-25, Instituto Valenciano de Investigaciones Económicas, S.A. (Ivie).
    19. Alberto Alesina & Andrea Ichino & Loukas Karabarbounis, 2011. "Gender-Based Taxation and the Division of Family Chores," American Economic Journal: Economic Policy, American Economic Association, vol. 3(2), pages 1-40, May.
    20. Scarborough, Helen & Bennett, Jeffrey W., 2006. "Estimating intergenerational utility distribution preferences," 2006 Conference (50th), February 8-10, 2006, Sydney, Australia 139899, Australian Agricultural and Resource Economics Society.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Dental fear treatment; willingness to pay.;

    JEL classification:

    • I11 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Health - - - Analysis of Health Care Markets
    • D61 - Microeconomics - - Welfare Economics - - - Allocative Efficiency; Cost-Benefit Analysis

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ssb:dispap:334. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: L Maasø (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/ssbgvno.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.