Heterogeneity of treatment effects by the internal ranking of methods.
IDM, lactational amenorrhea
LACTATIONAL AMENORRHEA
SEs in parentheses. The injectable was never the top-ranked nor the second-ranked method. For the purpose of grouping the two methods commonly ranked at the top, short-acting reversible contraceptives (SARC) includes pill and lactational amenorrhea method (LAM) in this table, while other includes the following combinations: pill-intrauterine device (IUD), pill-Implant, LAM-IUD, and LAM-pill. Individual decision-making (IDM) row represents the mean value of the outcome for the IDM group. Shared decision-making (SDM) row represents the mean value of the outcome for the SDM group. SDM-IDM is the differences of mean between SDM and IDM. While there are 399 clients who were randomized into IDM or SDM in our analysis, we have incomplete information on the discussion of methods for seven clients, leaving us a sample size of 392 for the analysis required for this table.SDM clients are always more likely to have discussed more methods than IDM in any subgroup (panel A), but the effects are particularly large when the IUD is ranked first (columns 1 and 3). The IUD is less popular in the study population than the implant (less than a third of IDM clients opted to discuss the IUD compared to 50% for the implant; fig. S7). SDM largely eliminated this gap. In contrast, unaware of the tailored rankings, IDM clients do not display any heterogeneity in the number of methods discussed across the distribution of top- and second-ranked methods. Panel B shows that 84% of SDM clients discussed the top-ranked method in detail, while this share is almost halved among IDM clients. SDM clients are also 8.0 pp more likely to have discussed the second-ranked method (That the clients in the two counseling regimes are equally likely to have adopted the method ranked at the top for them is a positive sign for the overall quality of counseling at HGOPY with the help of the tablet-based app: It implies that the modal IDM client, who is unaware of the personalized ranking of methods, asks the right questions about the one method she discusses in detail. It further implies that the nurse counselor, who is also unaware of the app’s ranking, is able to answer these questions and carry out the discussion in such a manner that IDM clients adopt the method deemed most suitable for them as often as SDM clients. On the other hand, the substantially increased adoption of second- or lower-ranked LARCs among SDM clients is consistent with their longer search (in terms of the number of methods discussed in detail) for a method that matches their preferences: Because the expected gains from considering another method are higher with a ranked list of methods than an unranked one (The relative price insensitivity of SDM clients observed in 