Applied Microeconomics Seminar Series
发布日期：2024-10-09讲座题目：Opportunity Cost Neglect in Health Judgments and Mitigating it by Talking Money
报告人:Lu Liu
内容摘要：Standard health economic models require people to have full awareness the time opportunity costs of falling sick, such as missed work and leisure. Yet, people with bounded rationality may overlook them, showing the bias of opportunity cost neglect (OCN). We propose that this bias commonly exists in judgments about preventive health because opportunity costs are typically less salient and evaluable than direct costs. We show that this bias leads to various behavioral failures, such as insufficient prevention, insensitivity to time duration, and insensitivity to preventive measure efficacy. To mitigate this bias, we designed an intervention entitled “Active Unpacking with Money” (AUM), which directs DMs to actively calculate the monetary losses from experiencing a negative health condition over a specified time period. Through a series of seven consecutive online experiments, we demonstrate that: (1) AUM amplifies people’s perceived severity of health risks and their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a guaranteed preventive measure; (2) AUM heightens people’s sensitivity to the length of a disease; and (3) AUM bolsters sensitivity to probabilistic information about prevention measure effectiveness. We discuss the practical significance of OCN and AUM as a potential nudging strategy.
报告人简介：Dr. Lu Liu is currently an instructor in the Department of Economics at New York University Shanghai. She completed her PhD in Economics at The Chinese University of Hong Kong in 2017 and was a visiting scholar at Columbia Business School in 2021. Her research focuses on labor economics, health economics, and applied microeconomics, and she has published several high-quality papers in journals like PNAS, Economics Letters, and Vaccines.
时间：2024年10月17日周四中午12:00-13:15
地点：学术会堂（南楼）608
