STORRE Community: This community contains the ePrints and eTheses produced by the School's staff and students.This community contains the ePrints and eTheses produced by the School's staff and students.http://hdl.handle.net/1893/26722024-03-22T03:44:47Z2024-03-22T03:44:47ZApplications of behavioural economics to health: three studies in health decision making and behaviourMurphy, Robert Phttp://hdl.handle.net/1893/358632024-03-20T09:31:24Z2023-06-27T00:00:00ZTitle: Applications of behavioural economics to health: three studies in health decision making and behaviour
Author(s): Murphy, Robert P
Abstract: To maximise the health of society within a limited budget, decision makers in public health systems need to decide which health treatments to fund and how best to support engagement by patients with treatments. Current practice is heavily influenced by rational choice theory. In this thesis we apply an alternative behavioural economics perspective to inform decisions on which treatments to fund and how to support engagement with services.
Decisions on which treatments to fund are often informed by the expected gains in patients’ quality-adjusted life years (QALYs). QALYs are derived from objective mortality data weighted by appraisals made by members of the general population of the likely impact on well-being associated with health states (the Q in QALYs). Concerns have been raised about the way in which the quality component of QALYs is calculated, leading to calls for ways to obtain experience informed general population appraisals.
In Chapter 2 we test the effect on general population preferences (N = 155) of being informed of patients’ mean ratings of their health state and whether the direction of an effect depends on people’s prior beliefs of patients’ mean rating of the health states. We find that when the mean ratings given by patients are higher (lower) than expected, participants in the intervention group provide significantly higher (lower) valuations than participants in the control group. In Chapter 3 we examine whether people (N = 1259) selectively underestimate the well-being consequences of moderate anxiety / depression as compared to other dimensions of health, and we test if being informed of actual changes in well-being associated with health states changes appraisals of their relative undesirability. We find that people provided with information on the consequences of health states for life satisfaction or for day affect report a higher preference for avoiding living with moderate anxiety / depression. Both Chapters show that informing people of these summary measures before they appraise health states is a feasible way to obtain experience informed preferences and that experience informed preferences differ to those obtained using the current method.
Non-attendance for hospital appointments is a problem. One way to increase attendance is to improve the accuracy of waiting lists by writing to patients to check if a procedure is still required. However, the did not return (DNR) rate to such letters is substantial. In Chapter 4 we test (N = 2855) whether the DNR rate is reduced by introducing nudges to validation letters. We find that the redesigned validation letter reduced DNRs, by 4.73 percentage points or 19.73%.
Taken together these studies show the importance of applying a behavioural economics perspective to inform decisions on how to maximise the health of society.2023-06-27T00:00:00ZRisk Communication Strategies and Consumer Behaviours within Food Related ContextsRadu, Madalinahttp://hdl.handle.net/1893/358502024-03-07T08:45:38Z2023-08-31T00:00:00ZTitle: Risk Communication Strategies and Consumer Behaviours within Food Related Contexts
Author(s): Radu, Madalina
Abstract: This thesis addresses various food safety and food consumption challenges and investigates
them from an economic perspective within three different, but related studies. Each
study provides public authorities with valuable information that will assist them with the
development and implementation of meaningful and targeted food policy interventions
designed to positively influence consumer food related behaviours and choices. These
studies further contribute to the literature by investigating and presenting several applications
of advancements in choice modelling. To address these challenges, two web-based
surveys were administrated to respondents in Scotland and the United Kingdom.
The first study that is presented investigates the role of individual responsibility prompts
in consumer choices of a food safety campaign, and how these prompts change their stated
choices of food safety campaigns that are most likely to influence the way they handle,
cook, and store their food. The means by which this investigation is achieved are novel, as
a discrete choice experiment is used to assess consumer choices of different types of food
safety campaigns. In this context, choice experiments are particularly useful because they
allow consumers to evaluate food safety campaigns with multiple characteristics. This is
different to previous studies that have used Likert-type rating scales to investigate specific
communication channels (e.g., television, newspapers, fact sheets). The findings generated
by this analysis reveal that emphasizing consumers’ individual responsibility can be
a factor that affects the effectiveness of a policy intervention, and that differently framed
responsibility prompts can be used to maximise the impact of such policies.
The second study builds on our understanding of the self-persuasive power of questions
and uses a multidisciplinary approach to investigate if and how differently framed
knowledge-based information can affect consumer processing strategies, and, consequently,
their consideration sets of alternatives. Additionally, this study also introduces and explores
the use of a novel approach – that of adjunct questions (i.e., questions that aim
to draw attention to important aspects of a text) – in stated choice experiment surveys.
This particular investigation conjectures that adjunct questions affect individuals’ attention, and accordingly, their intake of information, which, in turn, may impact how they
process the consideration set of alternatives in a choice task. This study’s findings confirm
that individuals’ consideration sets are affected, that they vary by differently framed
knowledge-based information, and that consumers consider and choose less frequently a
"No campaign" option in the adjunct question treatment.
The third study aims to understand a current societal and policy issue: how consumers
make trade-offs between meat and plant-based ingredients. It further extends our understanding
of choices and decision-making in two ways: (1) when the impact of meat consumption
to consumer health is communicated, and (2) when the environmental impact
of meat consumption is communicated. In addition to the contextual contribution, this
third study also contributes to the literature by exploring the use of Bayesian Truth Serum
and Inferred Valuation as hypothetical bias mitigation techniques. Overall, we report differences
in choices based on the contextual experimental set-up and the hypothetical bias
technique used. The findings in this third study demonstrate the differences and similarities
across these experimental setups and assist policymakers to design targeted policy
interventions.2023-08-31T00:00:00ZBullshit consumption: What lockdowns tell us about work-and-spend lives and care-full alternativesMolesworth, MikeGrigore, GeorgianaPatsiaouras, GeorgiosMoufahim, Monahttp://hdl.handle.net/1893/358462024-03-07T01:12:58Z2024-02-06T00:00:00ZTitle: Bullshit consumption: What lockdowns tell us about work-and-spend lives and care-full alternatives
Author(s): Molesworth, Mike; Grigore, Georgiana; Patsiaouras, Georgios; Moufahim, Mona
Abstract: COVID-19 disrupted ‘non-essential’ work and consumption, providing an unparalleled opportunity to examine work-and-spend culture, which we do via 44 in-depth interviews that capture experiences and reflections during UK lockdowns. Deploying Graeber’s conceptualisation of ‘bullshit jobs’ and related critiques of consumption, we first consider the possibility that contemporary work-and-spend lifestyles may deny the normative separation of work as worthy toil and consumption as its pleasurable opposite. Within such experience, and in addition to Graeber’s bullshit jobs, we find a parallel in bullshit consumption at work, in order to work, and because of work. Yet our findings also highlight that when freed from bullshit, participants engage in more caring practices for the self, others, and their possessions. We propose that much of our work-and-spend lives might be bullshit: routines that promise status, virtue, freedom, and pleasure, but feel meaningless, while displacing satisfying experiences of care. We conclude that a focus on subtractive logics – cutting the bullshit! – can activate both new critiques and optimism about societal arrangements.2024-02-06T00:00:00ZStudent dissatisfaction in Higher Education: a ‘fuzzy’ index approachCook, SteveWatson, DuncanWebb, AshaWebb, Roberthttp://hdl.handle.net/1893/358322024-03-07T01:07:35Z2023-09-19T00:00:00ZTitle: Student dissatisfaction in Higher Education: a ‘fuzzy’ index approach
Author(s): Cook, Steve; Watson, Duncan; Webb, Asha; Webb, Robert
Abstract: The revamp of the National Student Survey (NSS) has led to the elimination of the final ‘overall satisfaction’ question for Higher Education Institutions in England. This paper develops an index approach that can effectively summarise student satisfaction, utilising a ‘fuzzy poverty’ methodology that assigns weights to dissatisfaction outcomes based on their correlation levels. We show how our dissatisfaction index enables a comprehensive sector-level analysis by combining NSS data with sector-wide data and further show the usefulness by presenting a case study. Our approach can be universally and unbiasedly applied to student surveys globally, while alleviating problems related to the removal of the overall satisfaction question in the UK.2023-09-19T00:00:00Z