Abstract
Information on attitudes to risk could increase understanding of and explain risky health behaviors. We investigate two approaches to eliciting risk preferences in the health domain, a novel “indirect” lottery elicitation approach with health states as outcomes and a “direct” approach where respondents are asked directly about their willingness to take risks. We compare the ability of the two approaches to predict health-related risky behaviors in a general adult population. We also investigate a potential framing effect in the indirect lottery elicitation approach. We find that risk preferences elicited using the direct approach can better predict health-related risky behavior than those elicited using the indirect approach. Moreover, a seemingly innocuous change to the framing of the lottery question results in significantly different risk preference estimates, and conflicting conclusions about the ability of the indicators to predict risky health behaviors.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 836-858 |
| Number of pages | 23 |
| Journal | Health Economics (United Kingdom) |
| Volume | 31 |
| Issue number | 5 |
| Early online date | 22 Feb 2022 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - May 2022 |
Bibliographical note
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:First, we wish to thank all people who completed the surveys. We are also grateful to National Institute for Health Research for funding the project of which this paper is part. We wish to thank Raluca Pahontu for helpful comments on an earlier draft. This research was funded by the National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Units (NIHR HPRU) in Healthcare Associated Infections and Antimicrobial Resistance at the University of Oxford, in partnership with Public Health England (PHE) [grant number HPRU‐2012‐10,041 and NIHR200915]. Laurence S.J. Roope, James Buchanan, A. Sarah Walker, and Sarah Wordsworth are supported by funding from the NIHR Oxford Biomedical Research Centre. A. Sarah Walker is an NIHR Senior Investigator. The views expressed in this publication are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the National Health Service, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), the Department of Health or PHE.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2022 The Authors. Health Economics published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
