What Matters (and What Does Not) in Households' Decision to Invest in Malaria Prevention?

This paper examines the take-up of a new malaria-control device by rural households in Kenya, and tests whether the demand curve for the device varies with the framing of marketing messages and with the gender of the person targeted by the marketing. Previous research suggests that the demand for malaria prevention is highly price-sensitive (Jessica Cohen and Dupas 2008), even though the private returns to preventing malaria are very large (Christian Lengeler 2004). In the standard model of investment in human capital, individuals invest in a health product if the expected benefits from the product outweigh its costs (Michael Grossman 1972). In this framework, the low take-up observed at relatively moderate prices by Cohen and Dupas (2008) could be due to people underestimating the expected benefits of investing in prevention; or due to people being credit-constrained and unable to pay the cost up front. It is also possible that the standard model does not apply, because people have time-inconsistent preferences or because they are uncertain about their own preferences and rely on external cues to resolve their own uncertainty when they need to make a decision. An extensive literature in psychology and marketing suggests that decision-making can be affected by frames or cues that do not add information about a product, but can be effective at persuading individuals to invest in it. For example, in a recent field experiment in South Africa, Marianne Bertrand et al. (2008) found What Matters (and What Does Not) in Households’ Decision to Invest in Malaria Prevention?