Do Risk-takers Floss?: Experiments and Health
- Presenter:
Chair: David Bradford; Discussant: TBA Tue June 6, 2006 8:00-9:30 Room 235
Experimental economics methodologies provide a valuable and broad set of new tools with which to approach many issues in population health. The underlying idea is to create controlled decision problems (either strategic games or single-person decisions) in a laboratory or field environment, and to pay subjects in cash in order to induce truthful (i.e. incentive compatible) responses. These problems can be used to measure a wide variety of attributes, including: risk and time preferences, fairness/generosity, trust, cooperation/coordination, theory of mind, strategic reasoning, reciprocity, and so on.
There are two main ways to incorporate such methods into health research. The first is to ask subjects about their health behaviors (smoking, exercise, flossing, etc.) and to correlate these answers with their responses in the [context-free] decision problems described above. This has been done so far with a sample of approximately 150 Berkeley MPH students, after which we created an index of health behaviors (with higher scores corresponding to more health-protective behaviors). Interestingly, we find that this index is not correlated with time preference (financial patience), but it is correlated with risk-avoidance (in a financial gamble over losses). This suggests that policy interventions based solely on ‘investment in the future’ are unlikely to be effective. We will be extending this work in the coming months to subject populations in Africa and elsewhere in order to check the robustness of the results in other relevant settings.
The other application of these methods is to utilize them as measures of cognitive response following various stimuli. Specifically, ongoing projects are looking at the effects of alcohol (in a population of young social drinkers) and of sleep deprivation (in a population of emergency medicine residents). In both studies, we will be able to use the economic decision problems in order to assess the cognitive behavioral changes in a novel manner (when compared with the standard psychological tools). Finally, it is possible to use these games as a more fine-tuned instrument to analyze the exact pathways affected by physiological reactivity (e.g. cortisol levels) for determination of health behaviors. The policy implications in all of these cases include both intervention design and more effective targeting of vulnerable populations.
