Facilitating Healthy Dietary Habits: An Experiment with a Low Income Population

Michèle Belot, Jonathan James () and Jonathan Spiteri
Additional contact information
Jonathan James: University of Bath
Jonathan Spiteri: University of Malta

No 12675, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: This paper tests an intervention aimed at facilitating (cognitively) the adoption of healthy dietary habits. We provide easy-to-understand information about the risks of developing diabetes or heart diseases and give easy-to-follow dietary recommendations to minimize these risks. We implement two variations, one consisting of generic information, the other consisting of information tailored to the individual, the latter resembling newly developed on-line health assessment tools. On top of the information treatment, we implement a second experimental variation nudging people into spending more time thinking about their dietary choices. We find evidence that the information intervention leads to healthier choices in the short run, but mostly in the generic treatment. Surprisingly, we find that people are on average pessimistic about their health, and therefore receive good news on average when the information is tailored to them. We find no evidence that increasing the time available to make choices leads to healthier choices, and find no evidence of long-term changes in habits. These results do not support a bounded rationality explanation for poor dietary choices.

Keywords: time availability; information; heuristics; bounded rationality; dietary habits; health risks; laboratory experiments (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D83 H51 I12 I18 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 70 pages
Date: 2019-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-exp and nep-hea
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Published - published in: European Economic Review, 2020, 129, 103550

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp12675.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Facilitating healthy dietary habits: An experiment with a low income population (2020)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp12675

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().