What is the Price of Prevention? New Evidence from a Field Experiment

How does increasing access to treatment affect the demand for preventive testing? In this paper we present results from a randomized field experiment in Nigeria in which we offered cervical cancer screening to women at randomly chosen prices. To test our hypothesis, we also offered women a lottery where the payoff was a subsidy towards the cost of cervical cancer treatment (conditional upon a diagnosis of cervical cancer). We find that women randomly selected to receive the conditional cancer treatment subsidy were about 4 percentage points more likely to take up screening than those in the control group (an approximately 30% increase). We also show that the price of screening had a significant effect on the demand for screening: reducing the price of screening by 10 cents increased take-up of screening by about 1 percentage point (an approximately 7% increase)