nep-isf New Economics Papers
on Islamic Finance
Issue of 2018‒03‒05
two papers chosen by
Halimatun Aris


  1. Emotional Responses to Behavioral Economic Incentives for Health Behavior Change By van der Swaluw, Koen; Lambooij, Mattijs S; Mathijssen, Jolanda; Zeelenberg, Marcel; Polder, Johan; Prast, Henriette
  2. Cognition, optimism and the formation of age-dependent survival beliefs By Grevenbrock, Nils; Groneck, Max; Ludwig, Alexander; Zimper, Alexander

  1. By: van der Swaluw, Koen (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research); Lambooij, Mattijs S; Mathijssen, Jolanda (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research); Zeelenberg, Marcel (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research); Polder, Johan (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research); Prast, Henriette (Tilburg University, Center For Economic Research)
    Abstract: Many people aim to change their lifestyle, but have trouble acting on their intentions. Behavioral economic incentives and related emotions can support commitment to personal health goals, but the related emotions remain unexplored. In a regret lottery, winners who do not attain their health goals do not get their prize but receive feedback on what their forgone earnings would have been. This counterfactual feedback should provoke anticipated regret and increase commitment to health goals. We explored which emotions were actually expected upon missing out on a prize due to unsuccessful weight loss and which incentive-characteristics influence their likelihood and intensity. Participants reported their expected emotional response after missing out on a prize in one of 12 randomly presented incentive-scenarios, which varied in incentive type, incentive size and deadline distance. Participants primarily reported feeling disappointment, followed by regret. Regret was expected most when losing a lottery prize (vs. a fixed incentive) and intensified with prize size. Multiple features of the participant and the lottery incentive increase the occurrence and intensity of regret. As such, our findings can be helpful in designing behavioral economic incentives that leverage emotions to support health behavior change.
    Keywords: incentives; emotions; behavioral economics; health behavior; weight loss
    JEL: D91 I12
    Date: 2018
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:tiu:tiucen:4f800df8-c640-4522-b175-2629992336fd&r=isf
  2. By: Grevenbrock, Nils; Groneck, Max; Ludwig, Alexander; Zimper, Alexander
    Abstract: This paper investigates the roles psychological biases play in empirically estimated deviations between subjective survival beliefs (SSBs) and objective survival probabilities (OSPs). We model deviations between SSBs and OSPs through age-dependent inverse S-shaped probability weighting functions (PWFs), as documented in experimental prospect theory. Our estimates suggest that the implied measures for cognitive weakness, likelihood insensitivity, and those for motivational biases, relative pessimism, increase with age. We document that direct measures of cognitive weakness and motivational attitudes share these trends. Our regression analyses confirm that these factors play strong quantitative roles in the formation of subjective survival beliefs. In particular, cognitive weakness is an increasingly important contributor to the overestimation of survival chances in old age.
    Keywords: Subjective Survival Beliefs,Probability Weighting Function,Confirmatory Bias,Cognition,Optimism
    JEL: D12 D83 I10
    Date: 2018
    URL: http://d.repec.org/n?u=RePEc:zbw:safewp:200&r=isf

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