Are Children Rational Decision Makers when they are Asked to Value their own Health? A Contingent Valuation Study Conducted with Children and their Parents

Despite the importance of including children’s preferences in the valuation of their own health benefits no study investigated the ability of children to understand willingness to pay questions. Using a contingent valuation study we elicit children’s and parents’ willingness to pay (WTP) to reduce children’s risk of an asthma attack. Our results suggest that children are able to understand and value their own health risk reductions and their ability to do so improves with age. Child age was found to be inversely related to parents’ and children’s WTP. The results also suggest that non-paternal altruism is predictive of children’s WTP. For parents, care for their own-health, was found to be inversely related with their WTP for children’s risk reductions. Comparison of parents’ vs. children WTP suggest that parents are willing to sacrifice for their child’s health risk reduction an amount that is approximately twice the size of their children. The analysis of matched pairs of parents and children suggest that there are within-household similarities as the child’s WTP is positively related to parents’ WTP.