An experimental investigation of social risk preferences for health.

Unlabelled: In this paper, we use the risk apportionment technique of Eeckhoudt, Rey and Schlesinger (2007) to study higher order risk preferences for others' health as well as ex-ante and ex-post inequality preferences for social risky distributions, and their interaction. In an experiment on a sample of university students acting as impartial spectators, we observe risk aversion towards social health losses and a dislike of ex-ante inequality. In addition, evidence for ex-post inequality seeking is much weaker than evidence for ex-ante inequality aversion.

Decomposing social risk preferences for health and wealth.

This study reports the results of the first artefactual field experiment designed to measure the prevalence of aversion toward different components of social risks in a large and demographically representative sample. We identify social risk preferences for health and wealth for losses and gains, and decompose these attitudes into four different dimensions: individual risk, collective risk, ex-post inequality, and ex-ante inequality. The results of a non-parametric analysis suggest that aversion to risk and inequality is the mean preference for outcomes in health and wealth in the domain of gains and losses.

The formation of physician altruism.

We study how patient-regarding altruism is formed by medical education. We elicit and structurally estimate altruistic preferences using experimental data from a large sample of medical students (N = 733) in Germany at different progress stages in their studies. The estimates reveal substantial heterogeneity in altruistic preferences of medical students.

Multivariate risk preferences in the quality-adjusted life year model.

The interest in multivariate and higher-order risk preferences has increased. A growing body of literature has demonstrated the relevance and impact of these preferences, but for health the evidence is lacking. We measure multivariate and higher-order risk preferences for quality of life (QoL) and longevity, the two attributes of the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) model.

COVID-19-related attitudes, risk perceptions, preventive behaviours and economic impact in sub-Saharan African countries: implementing a longitudinal phone-based survey protocol in rural Senegalese households.

Introduction: Rural areas are considered safe havens against the increased spread of COVID-19 and associated restrictive measures, especially in contexts where public authorities are not in a position to systematically and substantially ease COVID-19-induced economic shocks. In the current sub-Saharan Africa context, still marked by uncertainty surrounding the spread of COVID-19, we present the protocol of an ongoing longitudinal study aimed at investigating COVID-19-related attitudes, risks perceptions, preventive behaviours and economic impact in rural areas in Senegal.

Methods And Analysis: A prospective randomised longitudinal study of 600 households located in three semiurban villages and nine randomly selected rural villages in the Niakhar area (located 135 km East of Dakar).

Beliefs and Risk Perceptions About COVID-19: Evidence From Two Successive French Representative Surveys During Lockdown.

Background: The outbreak of COVID-19 has been a major interrupting event, challenging how societies and individuals deal with risk. An essential determinant of the virus' spread is a series of individual decisions, such as wearing face masks in public space. Those decisions depend on trade-offs between costs (or benefits) and risks, and beliefs are key to explain these.

Attitudes about COVID-19 Lockdown among General Population, France, March 2020.

Because the effectiveness of a coronavirus disease lockdown in curbing coronavirus disease spread depends on public support, acquiring real-time information about the way populations reacted to the lockdown is crucial. In France, such public support remained fragile among low-income persons, probably because the lockdown exacerbated preexisting social inequalities and conflicts.

A comparison of individual and collective decision making for standard gamble and time trade-off.

Quality-Adjusted Life-Years (QALYs) are typically derived from individual preferences over health episodes. This paper reports the first experimental investigation into the effects of collective decision making on health valuations, using both time trade-off (TTO) and standard gamble (SG) tasks. We investigated collective decision making in dyads, by means of a mixed-subjects design where we control for learning effects.

Women's Attitudes Toward Invasive and Noninvasive Testing When Facing a High Risk of Fetal Down Syndrome.

Importance: Noninvasive prenatal testing (NIPT) using cell-free DNA in maternal blood is increasingly common compared with invasive testing (IT) in routine antenatal detection of Down syndrome (DS).

Objective: To assess attitudes and decision making in pregnant women facing a risk of fetal DS greater than 1 in 250 as established by combined first trimester screening at 11 to 14 weeks of gestation.

Design, Setting, And Participants: Survey study in which data were collected from pregnant women at high risk of fetal DS participating in a randomized clinical trial.

Measuring multivariate risk preferences in the health domain.

We investigate univariate and multivariate risk preferences for health (longevity) and wealth. We measure attitudes toward correlation and attitudes toward higher order dependence structures such as cross-prudence and cross-temperance, making use of the risk apportionment technique proposed by Eeckhoudt et al. (2007).

Ambiguity preferences for health.

In most medical decisions, probabilities are ambiguous and not objectively known. Empirical evidence suggests that people's preferences are affected by ambiguity. Health economic analyses generally ignore ambiguity preferences and assume that they are the same as preferences under risk.

Discounting health and money: New evidence using a more robust method.

This study compares discounting for money and health in a field study. We applied the direct method, which measures discounting independent of utility, in a representative French sample, interviewed at home by professional interviewers. We found more discounting for money than for health.

An elicitation of utility for quality of life under prospect theory.

This paper performs several tests of decision analysis applied to the health domain. First, we conduct a test of the normative expected utility theory. Second, we investigate the possibility to elicit the more general prospect theory.

Estimating sign-dependent societal preferences for quality of life.

This paper is the first to apply prospect theory to societal health-related decision making. In particular, we allow for utility curvature, equity weighting, sign-dependence, and loss aversion in choices concerning quality of life of other people. We find substantial inequity aversion, both for gains and losses, which can be attributed to both diminishing marginal utility and differential weighting of better-off and worse-off.

Time preferences, socioeconomic status and smokers' behaviour, attitudes and risk awareness.

Background: Tobacco control policies have succeeded in reducing tobacco use, but the negative correlation between smoking prevalence and socioeconomic status (SES) has increased. This study focused on the relationships between time preferences, SES, and smoking behaviour, attitudes and risk awareness.

Methods: A cross-sectional telephone survey was conducted in France in 2008 on a representative national sample of people aged 18-75 (N = 2000, including 621 smokers) years.

Responses to increasing cigarette prices in France: how did persistent smokers react?

Objectives: (1) To build a typology of persistent smokers' reactions to increasing cigarette prices (persistent smokers were defined as smokers who did not quit because of such increases) and (2) to investigate which factors were correlated with their reactions (we considered three categories: no reaction, trying to quit or smoking less, reducing the cost of smoking).

Methods: We used a French national telephone survey (n=2000; 621 smokers) that included questions about smokers' reactions to increasing cigarette prices, as well as questions about their socio-demographic background, personal time perspective, smoking behavior and reasons for smoking. We used logistic regressions to identify which of these factors were linked to smokers' reactions.