Developments in time preference and their implications for medical decision making

Abstract

The field of time preference is developing rapidly. It concerns important concepts for many economic issues. One important domain of application is health economics. This paper reviews several empirical and theoretical developments for time preference with special attention to the health economics field. In addition, the implications for medical decision making, long-term health-care planning and health economic evaluation are discussed. Recognition of this empirical evidence in health-care policy making is recommended, as well as a more transparent process of the framing and analysis of, and deliberation on, public policy.

Keywords:

• behaviour
• decision analysis
• medicine
• methodology
• time preference

Acknowledgements

Thanks are due to Werner Brouwer, Simon French (the editor), and an anonymous referee for thorough comments.

Notes

1 See Olson and Bailey (1981) for arguments in favour of positive discounting.

2 See Rubinstein (1988) for a formal definition.

3 Only studies letting subjects make personal decisions about their own future health are considered here. Decreasing impatience was also found for the comparison of life saving programmes (Cropper et al, 1992, 1994, Cairns and van der Pol, 1997; Lazaro Alquezar et al, 2001) and for subjects that had to make (hypothetical) decisions on behalf of other people (van der Pol and Cairns, 2002).