Home | Alex Chan, Economist

I am a PhD candidate in Health Economics at Stanford University. Before Stanford, I have extensive experience in the healthcare industry starting as a McKinsey consultant, and most recently as Senior Vice President of Market Strategy with Optum/UnitedHealth before joining academia. I received my MPH in Health Policy from Harvard University.

Curriculum Vitae

Health Economics, Market Design, Experimental and Behavioral Economics, Economics of Discrimination and Diversity, Labor Economics

Fields:

Google Scholar

Laurence C Baker (co-P)

References:

lcbaker@stanford.edu

Alvin E Roth (co-P)

alroth@stanford.edu

Michelle Mello

mmello@law.stanford.edu

Muriel Niederle (co-P)

niederle@stanford.edu

Working Paper

Discrimination and Quality Signals: A Field Experiment with Healthcare Shoppers

This paper provides evidence that customer discrimination in the market for doctors can be largely accounted for by inaccurate statistical discrimination. I evaluate customer preferences in the field with an online platform where cash-paying consumers can shop and book a provider for medical procedures based on a novel experimental paradigm called validated incentivized conjoint analysis (VIC). Customers evaluate doctor options they know to be hypothetical to be matched with a customized menu of real doctors, preserving incentives. Racial discrimination reduces patient willingness-to-pay for black and Asian doctors by 12.7% and 8.7% of the average colonoscopy price respectively; customers are willing to travel 100–250 miles to see a white doctor instead of a black doctor, and somewhere between 50–100 to 100–250 miles to see a white doctor instead of an Asian doctor. Further, providing signals of doctor quality reduces this willingness-to-pay racial gap by about 90%, which suggests that statistical discrimination is an important cause of the gap. The willingness-to-pay penalties on minority doctors are multiples of actual average quality differences, which suggest that inaccurate or behavioral statistical discrimination is at play. Actual booking behavior allows cross-validation of incentive compatibility of stated preference elicitation via VIC.

Publications

Hypothermic Machine Perfusion in Liver Transplantation

2021, New England Journal of Medicine 385: 766-768

US Organ Donation Policy

2020, JAMA 323(3): 278-279

Examining Pharmaceutical Benefits in the United States—A Framework

With Kevin Schulman

2020, JAMA Health Forum 1(3): e200291

Deep learning algorithms to identify documentation of serious illness conversations during intensive care unit admissions

(1st author) With Isabel Chien, Edward Moseley, Saad Salman, Sarah Kaminer Bourland, Daniela Lamas, Anne M Walling, James A Tulsky, Charlotta Lindvall

2019, Palliative Medicine 33(2): 187-196