健康领域的跨期决策与健康行为

健康领域的跨期决策关系着个体和国民的健康和福祉。目前学界对该领域的研究主要停留在参考传统金钱领域的相关理论模型和方法的阶段, 但健康跨期决策具有领域特异性, 沿袭金钱领域理论模型和方法, 导致该领域在研究方法和结果上存在较大的不一致性。健康跨期决策的行为后果是该领域关注重点, 多数研究均报告个体的低时间折扣率、高未来时间取向与其健康保护行为正相关, 与健康风险行为呈负相关。该领域也关注健康跨期决策的影响机制, 如决策对象和决策主体的核心特征等因素。未来研究亟需发展适用于健康领域的跨期决策模型和研究范式, 明确健康行为与跨期决策偏好的关系, 深入探讨健康跨期决策的内在选择机制, 并在健康行为干预和医疗卫生政策应用方面进行更多的尝试和探索。

Time preferences for public health and health behavior

Time preference for health is omnipresent and important at both individual and national levels. For a long time, research in this field has been limited to following inter-temporal choice models and methods in the traditional monetary domain of time preference studies. Given the domain-specificity of time preference in the health domain, these indiscriminately theoretical models led to inconsistent measures and results in the field. In the past few decades, researchers in this field have focused on the behavioral consequences of time preference for health. Most studies reported that lower temporal discount rates and higher future time perspectives are positively related to health protection behaviors and negatively related to health risk behaviors. Researchers also found that features of both decision-making objects and decision makers are key impact factors for time preference for health. Future studies should develop theoretical models and measurements that are more suitable to the time preferences for health domain, identify the relationship between healthy behaviors and time preference, and investigate the mechanism underlying the decision-making process. Future researchers should also explore interventions for health behaviors and their application to formulation of healthcare policies.