Ben Handel

Exactly.

Picking your plan.

I was looking at the data, and I said, wow.

Some of these consumers are making just terrible choices.

What I showed there is that people were losing at least $1,000 by choosing one option versus the other.

And these were often poorer people earning less than $40,000 a year.

There's a combination of factors.

The answer I usually give is that the firms don't know they're offering a dominated option.

Since I wrote that paper, there have been a couple studies, one by Justin Sidnor, who's at the University of Wisconsin.

And what he found was that this was happening because of the way firms update their premiums according to algorithms.

But in a naive way.

So they're not trying to offer these dominated plans.

In fact, offering them often works against the goals of the firm.

I think that's broadly accurate, yes.

But the smaller the firm...

The smaller operation you have in HR, the more likely you are to be offering a menu like this.

Yeah, that's a good question.

I think it's typically more the fault of the employer.

And the reason is that they're often bringing together plans from different insurers.

And if they're bringing in plans from the same health care insurer, they're often giving differential subsidies to those plans based on how much of the premiums they want to cover for employees.