RAPID Collaborative Research: Economic Preferences and Preventative Health Measures During a Pandemic

研究小组将进行选择实验，并结合一项调查，以确定COVID-19大流行如何影响经济偏好。他们还想确定这些偏好是否与个人采取的预防性健康行动有关。该项目将包括来自各种不同种族和族裔群体的受试者，以获得有关迄今为止在美国特别受COVID-19影响的群体的可靠信息。该项目将帮助我们了解，用于行为经济学和消费者选择的方法是否以及如何帮助我们预测促进健康行为的程度。这些结果也可能给我们提供关于如何最好地针对公共卫生传播的新见解。实验任务将衡量风险承受能力、时间偏好、利他主义、为公共产品做出贡献的意愿、合作意愿、自我保护意愿、竞争偏好和过度/缺乏信心。经济理论表明，个人偏好的每一个方面都在决定特定个人执行建议的健康行为的程度上发挥作用。这些行为的例子包括：戴着面具（利他主义，愿意为公共产品做出贡献），如实告知他人可能的暴露（愿意撒谎），避开人群和室内空间（风险承受能力，过度自信），以及为了未来的利益而限制今天的社交聚会（时间偏好）。调查方法将用于测量健康行为。该团队将使用这些数据来测试经济偏好测量是否确实能预测健康行为。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

The research team will conduct choice experiments combined with a survey to determine how the COVID-19 pandemic may be shaping economic preferences. They also want to determine whether those preferences are correlated with preventive health actions taken by individuals. The project will include subjects from a variety of different racial and ethnic groups, to get solid information on the groups that to date have been especially affected by COVID-19 in the United States. The project should help us understand whether and how methods developed for use in behavioral economics and consumer choice can also help us predict the extent of health promoting behaviors. The results may also give us new insights into how to best target public health communications.The experimental tasks will measure risk tolerance, time preference, altruism, willingness to contribute to public goods, cooperation, willingness to lie in self-protection, preference for competition, and over/under confidence. Economic theory suggests that each of these aspects of individual preferences play a role in determining the extent to which a given individual carries out recommended health behaviors. Examples of these behaviors are wearing a mask (altruism, willingness to contribute to public goods), truthfully informing others about possible exposure (willingness to lie), avoiding crowds and indoor spaces (risk tolerance, over confidence), and limiting social gatherings today for future benefits (time preference). Survey methods will be used to measure health behaviors. The team will use the data to test whether or not economic preference measurements do indeed predict health behaviors.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.