Time Preferences and Medication Adherence: A Field Experiment with Pregnant Women in South Africa

Christina Gravert, Kai Barron, Mette Trier Damgaard and Lisa Norrgren
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Mette Trier Damgaard: Department of Economics and Business Economics & TrygFonden’s Centre for Child Research, Aarhus University
Lisa Norrgren: Department of Economics, University of Gothenburg

No 20-29, CEBI working paper series from University of Copenhagen. Department of Economics. The Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI)

Abstract: The effectiveness of health recommendations and treatment plans depends on the extent to which individuals follow them. For the individual, medication adherence involves an inter-temporal trade-off between expected future health benefits and immediate effort costs. Therefore examining time preferences may help us to understand why some people fail to follow health recommendations and treatment plans. In this paper, we use a simple, real-effort task implemented via text message to elicit the time preferences of pregnant women in South Africa. We find evidence that high discounters are significantly less likely to report to adhere to the recommendation of taking daily iron supplements daily during pregnancy. There is some indication that time-inconsistency also negatively affects adherence. Together our results suggest that measuring time preferences could help predict medication adherence and thus be used to improve preventive health care measures.

Keywords: time preferences; medication adherence; field experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C93 D91 I12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 60
Date: 2020
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-exp and nep-hea
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (3)

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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kud:kucebi:2029

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