I am a Sixth-Year PhD Candidate in Economics at Indiana University Bloomington with research interests in empirical industrial organization and applied microeconomics.
I am on the job market during the 2024-2025 Academic Year.
In my job market paper, I develop a structural econometric model of the hospital industry to evaluate how patients' limited consideration of all contracted options affects healthcare prices, access, and the accuracy of counterfactual predictions.
You can contact me at bergerjr@iu.edu.
Research
Job Market Paper
The Impact of Limited Consideration on Market Outcomes in the Hospital Industry
Abstract: This paper introduces a random consideration sets model of hospital demand to analyze market interactions while relaxing the assumption that patients necessarily consider all options available from within their contracted networks of providers. A key contribution of the model is its ability to quantify the impact of bounded rationality on equilibrium market outcomes when firms compete for attention. The demand model identifies and estimates the probability that each patient considers and chooses each in-network hospital within a geographic radius of their home. On the supply side, hospitals compete in a two-stage game: (i) with each other for patients’ attention through advertising expenditure, and (ii) with insurers through Nash-in-Nash bargaining over prices. Assuming full consideration in hospital demand biases distance elasticities downward in magnitude, as it fails to account for attention decreasing with distance. Counterfactual simulations show that limited consideration reduces healthcare access and artificially differentiates products, leading to higher average prices and greater price dispersion across hospitals. Insurer-provided nudges through a recommender system can achieve competitive outcomes comparable to those under an unobtainable full consideration scenario. A retrospective merger is used as a natural experiment, providing evidence that accounting for bounded rationality in models of imperfect competition can improve the accuracy of counterfactual predictions.
Presented at: Annual Meeting of the MEA (March 2024), International Industrial Organization Conference (May 2024), North American Summer Meeting of the Econometric Society (June 2024), Graduate Student Conference at WUSTL (October 2024), SEA Annual Meeting (November 2024), AEA Meetings (January 2025)
Working Papers
Limited Consideration and Time Discounting in Mortgage Refinance Decisions, with Haizhen Lin, Ruli Xiao, and Jun Zhu
Abstract: While dynamic discrete choice models are commonly used across various fields to empirically analyze intertemporal decision-making, all existing approaches assume that decision makers pay attention to available choice options each period. This assumption is clearly at odds with observed human behavior in various intertemporal contexts: people forget to take prescribed medications, ignore ''Check Engine" lights, binge-watch television unintentionally, and are unaware of opportunities to refinance their mortgages. This paper introduces a dynamic discrete choice model with limited consideration, applied to study mortgage refinance decisions. The model disentangles the effects of limited consideration, switching costs, and time discounting in explaining households' refinancing behavior. We separately identify and estimate each of these channels. We then attribute the importance of each factor in explaining borrower behavior using data from the Home Affordable Refinance Program. Preliminary results suggest that assuming full consideration biases estimates of the discount factor downward and switching costs upward by economically significant margins.
Specialty Care Access as a Driver of Preventive Care Uptake
Abstract: This paper investigates how hospitals' downstream adoption of advanced medical technologies influences upstream preventive health screening behavior among both patients and physicians. Leveraging a natural experiment that combines variation in U.S. Preventive Services Task Force (USPSTF) guidelines for prostate cancer screening and the staggered adoption of robotic surgery across hospitals, I employ a triple-difference approach to analyze changes in screening rates. The USPSTF shifting its recommendation from discouraging to selectively encouraging screening leads to significantly higher screening rates in areas with nearby access to the downstream technology. This response appears to be driven by changes in patient behavior, specifically a higher frequency of primary care visits, rather than by shifts in physicians' testing thresholds. These results suggest that easier access to specialized care may act as a nudge for preventive care utilization, motivating patients to seek out care without affecting testing efficiency.
Teaching
Summer 2023: ECON-E 321 Intermediate Microeconomic Theory (Online), Syllabus
Fall 2021, Spring 2022, Fall 2022, Spring 2023: ECON-B 251 Fundamentals of Economics for Business I, Representative Syllabus
Spring 2021: ECON-E 201 Introduction to Microeconomics (Online)