2025年5月16日，伟易博行为科学与政策干预交织立异团队举行2025年春季学期第二期（总第二十三次）行为科学分享会。本次讲座约请北京大学全球康健与生长研究院康健经济学助理教授崔知涵博士带来题为 “Opportunity Cost Neglect in Preventive Health Decisions and Mitigating it by Talking Money” 的研究分享。
分享人 The Speaker
Dr. Zhihan Cui is an assistant professor of health economics at the Institute of Global Health and Development, Peking University, China. He graduated with a bachelor‘s degree from Peking University in 2015 and a Ph.D. degree in sustainable development from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University in 2021. Before joining Peking University, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher in the Behavioral Decision Making division at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Dr. Zhihan Cui’s main research areas are health economics, behavioral economics and health psychology, with research interests mainly including health decision-making, health literacy and behavioral change, healthcare policies, and mental health. His research has been published in scientific, economic, or psychological journals such as Proceedings of National Academy of Science, Health Psychology, Economic Letters, etc. He excels in combining interdisciplinary perspectives such as economics, psychology, and public health, with a focus on using randomized experimental methods to innovatively study biases in people's health behavior and decision-making, and explore effective improvement solutions.
分享会 The Seminar
Standard health economic models require people to have full awareness the time opportunity costs of falling sick, such as missed work and leisure. Yet, people with bounded rationality may overlook them, showing the bias of opportunity cost neglect (OCN). We propose that this bias commonly exists in judgments about preventive health because opportunity costs are typically less salient and evaluable than direct costs. We show that this bias leads to various behavioral failures, such as insufficient prevention, insensitivity to time duration, and insensitivity to preventive measure efficacy. To mitigate this bias, we designed an intervention entitled “Active Unpacking with Money” (AUM), which directs DMs to actively calculate the monetary losses from experiencing a negative health condition over a specified time period. Through a series of seven consecutive online experiments, we demonstrate that: (1) AUM amplifies people’s perceived severity of health risks and their willingness-to-pay (WTP) for a guaranteed preventive measure; (2) AUM heightens people’s sensitivity to the length of a disease; and (3) AUM bolsters sensitivity to probabilistic information about prevention measure effectiveness. We discuss the practical significance of OCN and AUM as a potential nudging strategy.
