School of Finance at Renmin University of China, China Financial Policy Research Center and China Insurance Institute, No. 59 Zhongguancun Street, Haidian Dist., Beijing 100872, PR China.
J Health Econ. 2021 Jul;78:102476. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2021.102476. Epub 2021 Jun 2.
In this paper, we study the willingness to pay for reductions in health risks within a framework of anticipated regret. We show that ex post information provision can be a relevant factor for regret theory to account for why people are sometimes so inclined to protect themself against certain types of health risks but not others. In particular, we find that under full resolution of uncertainty disproportionate aversion to large regrets exaggerates willingness to pay estimates. The effect induced by this notion of regret aversion can be interpreted as if regret-averse people overweight risk reductions due to prevention. However, as feedback over forgone acts is missing, the regret aversion effect disappears. Finally, we show that information avoidance induced by regret aversion can significantly bias our evaluation to prefer those health programs that completely eliminate a risk, i.e., the certainty effect.
在本文中，我们在预期遗憾框架内研究了对健康风险降低的支付意愿。我们表明，事后信息提供可能是遗憾理论的一个相关因素，以解释为什么人们有时如此倾向于保护自己免受某些类型的健康风险，但又不是所有风险。具体而言，我们发现，在完全消除不确定性的情况下，对大遗憾的不成比例的厌恶会夸大支付意愿的估计。这种对遗憾的厌恶的概念引起的影响可以解释为，如果后悔厌恶的人会因预防而过度重视风险降低。然而，由于错过了对未采取行动的反馈，遗憾厌恶的影响就消失了。最后，我们表明，遗憾厌恶引起的信息回避会严重影响我们的评估，偏好那些完全消除风险的健康计划，即确定性效应。
