Self-interest, positional concerns and distributional considerations in healthcare preferences.

Efficiently allocating scarce healthcare resources requires nuanced understanding of individual and collective interests as well as relative concerns, which may overlap or conflict. This paper is the first to empirically investigate whether and to what extent self-interest (SI), positional concerns (PC) and distributional considerations (DC) simultaneously explain individual decision making related to access to healthcare services. Our investigation is based on a stated choice experiment conducted in two countries with different healthcare systems, the United States (US) and the United Kingdom (UK).

For Me or for My Relatives? Approximating Self-Protection and Local Altruistic Motivations Underlying Preferences for Public Health Policies Using Risk Perception Metrics.

Objectives: Research efforts evaluating the role of altruistic motivations behind health policy support are usually based on direct preference elicitation procedures, which may be biased. We propose an indirect measurement approach to approximate self-protection-related and altruistic motivations underlying preferences for public health policies.

Methods: Our new approach relies on associations between on the one hand decision makers' perceived health risk for themselves and for close relatives and on the other hand their observed preferences for health policies that reduce such risks.