Children's oral health behaviour and new preventative health products in rural China

Abstract

How to help children develop good health habits and improve people's health to eventually promote the quality of labour productivity are important issues for developing countries. Understanding how consumers adopt and demand new health products can also help governments or non‐governmental organizations design more effective interventions. This study utilizes surveys and randomized field experiments conducted in a rural village in China to study the impact of oral health promotion education on children's demand for dental floss picks and their health behaviour. Our results show that children are highly sensitive to price. Children who were exposed to the oral health promotion intervention—learning to sing the oral health song—were willing to pay more for dental floss picks, but the actual quantity bought in the experiment was not significantly higher than that in the control group. In a follow‐up survey, we find that subjects increased their frequency of toothbrushing on average, but the spillover effects were not as strong as those in the literature. More risk‐loving subjects reported a higher willingness to pay during the experiment, but they were less likely to tell their family about the product during the camp or try to buy floss picks after the camp. This finding helps reconcile disparate results about risk preference in earlier literature. Lastly, we find no evidence that time preference affects demand or health behaviour.