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

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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.

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  • 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
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    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.
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    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

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