Negative and zero time preference for health

Abstract

The assumption of positive time preference is seldom challenged in analyses of intertemporal choices, despite considerable evidence of zero and negative discount rates. In this study, the majority of respondents have positive discount rates, but a substantial number have negative or zero discount rates. Using probit regression, the perception of the severity of the health-state, gender, education and perception of the questions in terms of difficulty are shown to influence whether individuals have positive discount rates.

The effect of duration and time preference on the gap between adult and child health state valuations in time trade-off

“…More specifically, we found 39.3% respondents were negative discounters for children and adults, while 25.3% discounted positively for both. However, similar findings of negative discounting have been present in other studies [ 16 , 44 , 54 , 60 , 61 ]. It is also worth noting that some popular methods ignore the possibility of negative discounting altogether [ 62 ], biasing estimates of discount rates upwards.…”

“…Our findings of a lack of discounting (on average) are worth discussing. Although these results confirm some previous studies [ 16 , 43 , 44 , 54 ], other studies found higher discount rates[ 39 , 48 , 55 – 57 ]. 2 One explanation for the low amount of discounting in this and other recent studies is the use of the direct method.…”

Social discounting of pain

“…4, and resembles the decreasing curve observed in previous studies (Story et al, 2015, 2013). It is important to point out here that although this curve resembles the hyperbolic curves seen for reward discounting, it is fundamentally different, since here the relationship implies increasing disvalue of pain with delay (Loewenstein & Prelec, 1991; Van Der Pol & Cairns, 2000). Hyperbolic discounting of pain alone would result in choices to defer pain, that is, p ( choose later ) would exceed 0.5 and would increase with delay.…”

Does temporal discounting explain unhealthy behavior? A systematic review and reinforcement learning perspective

“…Indeed illness and health improvement are intuitively more analogous to pain and relief than to appetitive rewards and losses. Furthermore, consistent with respondents exhibiting dread for delayed illness, in an illness discounting task, individuals who perceived the illness as more severe were more likely to have negative discount rates (Van Der Pol and Cairns, 2000). Zero time preference for health and pain-related outcomes may result from the experiential nature of these outcomes; unlike money, health is an experiential commodity which cannot be saved or invested (Chapman and Elstein, 1995).…”