Christopher Whaley is a policy researcher at the RAND Corporation and professor at the Pardee RAND Graduate School. His research focuses on using large-scale medical claims data to examine how information and financial incentives influence patient’s choice of providers, how providers respond to changes in consumer incentives, and how employers and insurers can design insurance benefits to promote value.
His research has been published in a variety of clinical, health policy, and economics journals. He is the lead author of a JAMA paper that examines the effects of online price transparency information. This paper was a finalist for the 2015 National Institute for Health Care Management Foundation Annual Health Care Research Award. He also received the 2015 AHRQ Research Conference Director’s Award for a paper published in JAMA Internal Medicine that examines the effect of reference pricing on consumer choice of providers for cancer screening services. Whaley received a B.A. in economics from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in health economics from the University of California, Berkeley.