Bates White Partner and Massachusetts Institute of Technology Professor Michael Whinston, with co-authors Benjamin Handel and Igal Hendel were awarded the Frisch Medal for their paper “Equilibria in Health Exchanges: Adverse Selection versus Reclassification Risk.”
The Frisch Medal was established by the Econometric Society to encourage the creation of good applied work; it is given every two years for an article published in Econometrica during the preceding five years. Dr. Whinston’s article was published in the July 2015 issue.
This article studies health exchanges and develops a framework that combines data on health outcomes and insurance plan choices with a model of a competitive insurance exchange in order to predict outcomes under different exchange designs. The authors apply this framework to examine the effects of regulations that determine insurers’ ability to use health status information in pricing. In the current environment, where health insurance is at the top of the policy agenda, this paper offers a framework that allows analysis of such questions with rigor, “fully reflecting the spirit of the Frisch prize,” according to the Society.
Dr. Whinston is a leading expert in the fields of antitrust economics and regulation, industrial organization, and microeconomics. For more information on Dr. Whinston, see his academic profile.
More information on the Econometric Society and the Frisch Medal are available online.
