Abstract

At the core of the decision to invest in prevention are individuals who face immediate real costs against future and uncertain benefits. In this paper, we elicit subjects’ willingness to pay to reduce future risk. In our experiments, subjects are given a cash endowment and a risky lottery. They report their willingness to pay to exchange the risky lottery for a safe one. Subjects play the lottery either immediately, eight weeks later, or 25 weeks later. Thus, both the lottery and the future are sources of uncertainty in our experiments. In two additional treatments, we control for future uncertainty with a continuation probability (a stopping rule), constant and independent across periods, that simulates the chances of not being able to return to play the lottery after 8 and 25 periods. We find evidence for a present bias in both the time-delay sessions and the continuation probability sessions, suggesting that this bias robustly persists in environments including both risk and future uncertainty. Therefore, eliciting prevention behaviour is a major challenge.

摘要

投资于预防的决定的核心是面对未来和不确定的利益而面临直接实际成本的个人。在本文中，我们激发了受试者降低未来风险的支付意愿。在我们的实验中，向受试者提供现金捐赠和高风险彩票。他们表示愿意为危险的彩票兑换安全的彩票支付。受试者可以立即，八周后或25周后玩彩票。因此，在我们的实验中，彩票和未来都是不确定性的来源。在另外两种处理方式中，我们以连续概率（停止规则）来控制未来的不确定性，该概率在各个周期内保持恒定且独立，这模拟了在8和25个周期后无法返回玩彩票的机会。我们发现在时延会话和连续概率会话中均存在当前偏差的证据，这表明这种偏差在包括风险和未来不确定性的环境中均会持续存在。因此，引发预防行为是一个重大挑战。