JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Willingness to pay (WTP) can be used as a measure of benefits that provides an overall valuation of a product or service from end users’ perspectives. Contingent valuation (CV) and discrete choice experiment (DCE) are two major approaches for measuring WTP in the health domain. These WTP methods have started to be used to examine how consumers value mobile health applications (apps), but research in this direction is still in its infancy.

Objective:

We aimed to assess the WTP for health apps using two different CV techniques (i.e., open-ended question and payment scale method), and to assess the marginal WTP for different attributes of health apps through a DCE. We also aimed to conduct a methodological comparison across these three WTP approaches.

Methods:

A cross-sectional questionnaire survey was conducted among 600 adults living in Hong Kong (July 2019 - February 2020). Descriptive statistics were used to reflect the sample characteristics and WTP for health apps. Random probit regression was used to estimate the marginal WTP values. Repeated-measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) was conducted to examine the differences in perceived certainty and difficulty across the three different WTP approaches.

Results:

The median WTP for health app elicited using open-ended question and payment scale method was 10 (interquartile range=100) HK$ and 25 (interquartile range=100) HK$ respectively (1 US$ ≈ 7.8 HK$). The marginal WTP for improvements in usefulness, ease of use, security and privacy, healthcare professional’s attitude, smartphone storage consumption, and mobile Internet consumption were 43.85 HK$, 31.54 HK$, 50 HK$, 13.85 HK$, 23.08 HK$, and 36.15 HK$ respectively. Perceived certainty for open-ended question was significantly lower than payment scale method [t (596)=-3.05, p=0.002]. Perceived difficulty for DCE was significantly higher than open-ended question [t (594)=-2.62, p=0.009] and payment scale method [t (595)=-3.83, p=0.0001].

Conclusions:

Although health apps are highly valued by some respondents, almost half of the respondents of this study were not willing to pay anything for health apps, mostly due to a lack of trust of health apps. The attribute valued most by users is security and privacy, suggesting that a complete security system to protect personal health information could greatly promote the perceived benefits of health apps. From the methodological perspective, DCE was more cognitively demanding than CV approaches. Between the two CV approaches examined, open-ended question was related to less certainty of responses, more zero responses and more conservative responses.