(Belief in) life after death impacts the utility of life before it - a difference in preferences or an artefact?

Michał Jakubczyk, Dominik Golicki and Maciej Niewada

No 2016-007, KAE Working Papers from Warsaw School of Economics, Collegium of Economic Analysis

Abstract: In most of the religions the preservation of own, God-given, life is obligatory. The time-trade-off method (TTO) forces to voluntarily forego life years. We verify if this is a problem for the religious and how it impacts the TTO results. We used the data from the only EQ-5D valuation in Poland (2008, three-level, 321 respondents, 23 states each) a very religious (mostly catholic) country. We used the belief in afterlife question to measure the religiosity on two levels: strong (definitely yes) and some (also rather yes), both about a third of the sample. The religious on average (yet, not statistically significant) spend more time doing TTO and consider it more difficult. The religious more often are non-traders: odds ratio (OR)=1.97 (strongly), OR=1.55 (rather); and less often consider a state worse-than-death: OR=0.67 (strongly), OR=0.81 (rather). These associations are statistically significant (p

Keywords: Health-related quality of life; Utility; Preference elicitation; Time trade-off; Religion; Life after death (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C25 I10 I31 N30 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 18 pages
Date: 2016-04
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-neu and nep-upt
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