{"doi":"10.3386/w34137","title":"Social Defaults and Plan Choice: The Case of Spousal Following","abstract":"We study how couples in the Medicare Part D program choose an insurance plan.Over 70 percent of enrollees choose the same plan as their spouse.Even among those with differing healthcare needs, well over half do so.Discrete-choice models suggest beneficiaries value being on the same plan as their spouse at over a thousand dollars per year.Using a regression-discontinuity design, we show that younger spouses disproportionately follow their older spouse's plan choice.Joint plan choice contributes modestly to overall overspending, but increases costs substantially for the couples with different cost-minimizing plans.","journal":"National Bureau of Economic Research","year":2025,"id":558853,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":1,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.9567,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2025-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":555529,"name":"Timothy Layton","orcid":"0000-0001-9626-4892","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":555530,"name":"Dániel Prinz","orcid":"0000-0002-9409-1964","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":1460079,"name":"Julia Yates","orcid":null,"position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":556538,"name":"Tal Gross","orcid":null,"position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":0,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T02:55:30.312295Z","pmid":null,"pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}