Welfare analysis in insurance markets

“Efficiency” in economics can be employed in two distinct ways: as a statement about the class of policies that all policy advisors would agree to, regardless of their views about distributional preferences; or as something valuable that policy advisors potentially need to trade-off against equity goals. This distinction can be safely put to the side in some settings, for instance when information is symmetric, individuals have linear-in-consumption preferences, and the planner can implement person-specific taxes and transfers. In asymmetric information settings like insurance markets, it cannot. The efficiency notion employed by Einav and Finkelstein (J Econ Perspect 25(1):115–138, 2011) for studying competitive insurance markets (EF-efficiency) can therefore only be understood in the second way, and policy recommendations based on EF-efficiency alone thus amount to a tacit expression of indifference to distributional concerns.