Heterogeneous Preferences for Micro Health Insurance Attributes in Rural Cambodia: Latent Class Analysis

This study estimates the heterogeneous preferences and willingness-to-pay (WTP) of potential clients for different attributes of micro health insurance (MHI) and to seek a more acceptable insurance scheme in rural Cambodia. A latent class model is employed to treat with heterogeneity of consumer preferences, and found a two-class model as the best model, where one of the two classes is responsive to improvement of micro health insurance scheme. In the comparison of the two classes, the second class, comprising household heads who were younger and well-educated, with more remittances from migrant family members, more assets, and facing more illness, was significantly responsive to improvement in the insurance schemes. As for present time bias, we could not find any evidence that supports the hypothesis that it negatively affects WTP for MHI. In addition, our findings suggest that potential insurance customers who would have purchased MHI accounted for more than 60% in our study area, Thus, our results can be used to support improvements in existing MHI to attract more MHI customers.