paying people to be healthy

Paying People to Be Healthy

User Financial Incentives (UFIs) have emerged as a powerful tool for health promotion. Strong evidence suggests that large enough incentives paid to individuals, conditional on behaviour they can control, encourages more of the desired behaviour. However, such interventions can have unintended consequences for non-targeted behaviours. Implementation difficulties that result in individuals not u...

Paying people to be healthy.

User Financial Incentives (UFIs) have emerged as a powerful tool for health promotion. Strong evidence suggests that large enough incentives paid to individuals conditional on behaviour they can control encourages more of the desired behaviour. However, such interventions can have unintended consequences for non-targeted behaviours. Implementation difficulties that result in individuals not und...

Paying people to lose weight and stop smoking.

Unhealthy behaviors, such as smoking, poor diet, and sedentary lifestyles, account for as much as 40% of premature deaths in the U.S. Although behavioral interventions have the potential to improve health, behavior change is difficult, especially over the long term. Many people have difficulty changing health behaviors because it requires trade-offs between immediate consumption and delayed and...

Dynamic Technology Subsidies : Paying People Not to Wait ∗

We analyze how a policymaker should structure subsidies over time in order to induce agents to adopt a new durable good technology. We theoretically demonstrate that, if agents are myopic, a policymaker can price discriminate by using a subsidy that increases over time but can take advantage of technological change by using a subsidy that decreases over time. However, if agents plan their adopt...

Paying to Be Nice: Consistency and Costly Prosocial Behavior

Building on previous research in economics and psychology, we propose that the costliness of initial prosocial behavior positively influences whether that behavior leads to consistent future behaviors. We suggest that costly prosocial behaviors serve as a signal of prosocial identity and that people subsequently behave in line with that self-perception. In contrast, costless prosocial acts do n...

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