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AbstractAcross health systems, there is increasing interest in applying behavioral economics insights to health policy challenges. Policy decision makers have recently discussed a range of diverse health policy interventions that are commonly brought together under a behavioral umbrella. These include randomized controlled trials, comparison portals, information labels, financial incentives, sin taxes, and nudges. A taxonomy is proposed to classify such behavioral interventions. In the context of risky health behavior, each cluster of policies is then scrutinized under two respects: (i) What are its genuinely behavioral insights? (ii) What evidence exists on its practical effectiveness? The discussion highlights the main challenges in drawing a clear mapping between how much each policy is behaviorally inspired and its effectiveness.

Abstract:
We elicit and estimate risk preferences for a pool of young adults in the UK, and explore their links with healthy eating and risky health behaviours. We construct the Healthy Eating Index (HEI) as an overall indicator of nutritional quality, and we use it to complement the body mass index BMI. While for females we find no significant association between the BMI and risk preferences, males with high BMI appear more risk-seeking. However, this association disappears when controlling for the quality of the diet. For males, the HEI is significantly associated with risk preferences. Males smoking status is not associated with risk preferences.

AbstractEffective communication is essential for delivering public health messages and enabling behaviour change. Little is known about possible backfiring, or spillover effects, of COVID-19 vaccine messaging. In a study with n = 1,848 United Kingdom (UK) adults, we assess whether communication strategies that target vaccine hesitancy have any unintended, positive or negative, spillover effects on people's intention to engage in protective, compliance and prosocial behaviours. In June–July 2021, we conducted an online experiment to assess the potential spillover effects of three messages, emphasising (a) the medical benefits of COVID-19 vaccination, (b) the non-medical collective benefits of vaccination or (c) the non-medical individual benefits of holding a vaccination certificate. Exposure to different messages did not significantly affect people's intention to engage in protective, compliance, or prosocial behaviours. Instead, vaccination status (being vaccinated vs not) was positively associated with intentions to engage in protective, compliance and prosocial behaviours. Our results suggest that communication strategies that aim to increase vaccination uptake do not have any unintended effects on other health behaviours and vaccination campaigns can be tailored to specific populations to increase uptake and compliance.

ABSTRACTUnderstanding risk tolerance is crucial for predicting and changing behavior across various domains, including health and safety, finance, and ethics. This remains true during a crisis, such as the COVID‐19 pandemic, and leads to a key question: Do current risk measures reliably predict risk‐taking in the drastically different context of a pandemic? The Domain Specific Risk‐Taking (DOSPERT) scale, one of the most widely used risk‐taking measures, assesses self‐reported risk‐taking in response to 30 risky situations across five domains. With the hypothetical risks of the DOSPERT being based on prepandemic circumstances, we estimate that three out of four of its risk‐taking situations were not possible due to preventive measures or did not reflect risk‐taking in times of COVID‐19. In addition, COVID‐19 brought forth new behaviors deemed risky. With an aim to better predict risk‐taking in times of a pandemic, we introduce the Pandemic DOSPERT (PDOSPERT). We summarize three preregistered online studies with 1254 UK participants to validate the scale against the original DOSPERT and three other common risk‐taking measures. We also test its ability to predict pandemic risk‐related behaviors at three points in time over 2 years. Overall, we find that the PDOSPERT scale significantly improves predictions for pandemic‐related risk behavior as compared to the original DOSPERT. In particular, the health/safety subscale is significantly and strongly associated with pandemic‐related risk behavior. We not only validate a pandemic‐specific risk task but also introduce a template for developing context‐ and domain‐sensitive measures for risk‐taking in the future.

Using a nationally representative sample of 1052 respondents from the United Kingdom, we systematically tested the associations between the experimental trust game and a range of popular self-reported measures for trust, such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the Rosenberg scale for self-reported trust. We find that, in our UK representative sample, the experimental trust game significantly and positively predicts generalised self-reported trust in the GSS. This association is robust across a number of alternative empirical specifications, which account for multiple hypotheses corrections and control for other social preferences as measured by the dictator game and the public good game, as well as for a broad range of individual characteristics, such as gender, age, education, and personal income. We discuss how these results generalise to nationally representative samples from six other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Slovenia, and the US).

Using a nationally representative sample of 1052 respondents from the United Kingdom, we systematically tested the associations between the experimental trust game and a range of popular self-reported measures for trust, such as the General Social Survey (GSS) and the Rosenberg scale for self-reported trust. We find that, in our UK representative sample, the experimental trust game significantly and positively predicts generalised self-reported trust in the GSS. This association is robust across a number of alternative empirical specifications, which account for multiple hypotheses corrections and control for other social preferences as measured by the dictator game and the public good game, as well as for a broad range of individual characteristics, such as gender, age, education, and personal income. We discuss how these results generalise to nationally representative samples from six other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (France, Germany, Italy, Korea, Slovenia, and the US).

AbstractTrust is key for economic and social development. But why do we trust others? We study the motives behind trust in strangers using an experimental trust game played by 7236 participants, in six samples representative of the general populations of Germany, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, the UK and the USA. We examine the broadest range of potential determinants of trustor sending to date, including risk tolerance, preferences for redistribution, and conformity. We find that even though self‐interest, indicated by expected returns, is relevant for trustor behaviour, the most important correlate of sending is participants' altruism or fairness concerns, as measured by giving in a dictator game. We also find that in our large and representative sample, behaviour in the trust game and responses in a trust survey are significantly correlated, and that similar correlates—altruism in particular—are relevant for both.