Messaging and the Mandate: The Impact of Consumer Experience on Health Insurance Enrollment Through Exchanges

The ability of web-based retailers to learn about and provide targeted consumer experiences is touted as an important distinction from traditional retailers. In principal, web-based insurance exchanges could benefit from these advantages. Using data from a large-scale experiment by a private sector health insurance exchange we estimate the returns to experimentation and targeted messaging. We find significant improvements in conversions in one treatment tested. Underlying the average impact were both inter temporal and demographic heterogeneity. We estimate that learning and targeted messaging could increase insurance applications by approximately 13 percent of the baseline conversion rate.