The future’s so bright, I gotta wear sunscreen: Dispositional optimism and preferences for prioritizing health care

Jeroen Luyten (), Pieter Desmet, Roselinde Kessels, Peter Goos () and Philippe Beutels

Working Papers from University of Antwerp, Faculty of Business and Economics

Abstract: Priority setting in health care involves many complex social value judgments. Whereas a wide body of empirical research has emerged that describe how people make these judgments, little is known about the psychological background against which they are made. In this study, we investigate whether the character trait of dispositional optimism, i.e. anticipating a positive or negative future, influences the way people think about priority setting in health care. We do this by linking a representative sample of the Belgian population’s (N=750) responses on the Revised Life Orientation Test to their responses to a discrete choice experiment (DCE) about priority setting. We find that more pessimistic individuals are on average in worse (self-reported) health, are younger, are more likely to smoke and are less likely to have a university degree than their more optimistic counterparts. Controlling for these respondent characteristics, we find that dispositional optimism indeed matters to priority setting. “Pessimists” are less willing to invest limited resources in prevention and are less in support of prioritizing younger generations over older ones.

Keywords: Equity; Prevention; Allocation; Personality; Discrete choice experiment (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 C99 H4 I18 I19 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 17 pages
Date: 2015-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dcm, nep-exp, nep-hea and nep-ias
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ant:wpaper:2015015

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