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Are You What You Eat? Experimental Evidence on Health Habits and Risk Preferences

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  • Matteo M. Galizzi
  • Marisa Miraldo

Abstract

We run an experiment to assess whether preferences for risk significantly differ for individuals with different health habits. We administrate a questionnaire followed by an experimental test to a sample of 120 subjects. The questionnaire measures health characteristics, habits and life style and assesses details about individual nutritional balance, drinking, smoking and physical exercise. We construct a number of individual health and nutritional indexes, including the Healthy Eating Index based on the USDA guidelines. We elicit preferences for risk using variants of the Holt and Laury (2002) paired lotteries test. Conditional on individual health habits and life style variables, we estimate the risk preferences for each subject, using Maximum Likelihood estimation. We observe that risk preferences significantly differ for subjects with different health habits and found some evidence of risk aversion. In particular, while smokers do not appear to be significantly more risk seeking, subjects with high scores of the Healthy Eating Index are characterized by higher degree of risk aversion.

Suggested Citation

  • Matteo M. Galizzi & Marisa Miraldo, 2010. "Are You What You Eat? Experimental Evidence on Health Habits and Risk Preferences," Working Papers 1003, University of Brescia, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:ubs:wpaper:1003
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    Cited by:

    1. L. Corazzini & A. Filippin & P. Vanin, 2014. "Economic Behavior under Alcohol Influence: An Experiment on Time, Risk, and Social Preferences," Working Papers wp944, Dipartimento Scienze Economiche, Universita' di Bologna.
    2. Vasilios Kosteas, 2015. "Physical activity and time preference," International Journal of Health Economics and Management, Springer, vol. 15(4), pages 361-386, December.
    3. Galizzi, Matteo M. & Machado, Sara R. & Miniaci, Raffaele, 2016. "Temporal stability, cross-validity, and external validity of risk preferences measures: experimental evidence from a UK representative sample," LSE Research Online Documents on Economics 67554, London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library.
    4. Miraldo, M & Galizzi, M & Stavropoulou, C, 2013. "Doctor-patient differences in risk preferences, and their links to decision-making: a field experiment," Working Papers 12578, Imperial College, London, Imperial College Business School.
    5. Brañas-Garza, Pablo & Espín, Antonio M. & Lenkei, Balint, 2015. "BMI is not related to altruism, fairness, trust or reciprocity: Experimental evidence from the field and the lab," MPRA Paper 68184, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    6. Miraldo, M & Galizzi, M & Stavropoulou, C, 2013. "In sickness but not in wealth: Field evidence on patients’ risk preferences in the financial and health domain," Working Papers 31053, Imperial College, London, Imperial College Business School.
    7. repec:imp:wpaper:12579 is not listed on IDEAS

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