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Title: Self Protection through Food Choices under Health Risk and Precarity: A Discrete Choice Experiment
Abstract: Food is a central determinant of health, yet its relationship with wealth remains debated in economics. According to expected utility theory, the degree of substitutability between health and wealth determines whether the willingness to pay to reduce illness risk increases or decreases with baseline probability. Building on this framework, our study investigates how vulnerability to chronic disease shapes food-related trade-offs, and whether these mechanisms differ across levels of socioeconomic deprivation.
The experimental design combines two complementary approaches. First, perceived vulnerability is manipulated through vignettes: participants are randomly assigned to a 10%, 50%, or 90% risk of developing diabetes within the next five years, with dietary behavior increasing or reducing this probability. Second, participants complete a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE), in which they choose three-day food baskets varying in price, nutritional quality, taste, and preparation time. Prices are individualized and adjusted by ±20%, while other attributes are presented with three levels each. A questionnaire further collects sociodemographic, health, and psychosocial information, based on Protection Motivation Theory.
The analysis estimates the relative importance of food attributes and substitution rates, while testing whether deprivation moderates the health–price trade-off. This provides novel evidence on whether health and wealth act as substitutes or complements in food choices.
(Anthropo-Lab, Université Catholique de Lille)
(Anthropo-Lab, Université Catholique de Lille)
Title: Walking for Rewards: Gender Differences in Response to App-Based Incentives
Abstract:
This paper seeks to determine whether women and men respond similarly to a step-tracking application, which offers monetary rewards for steps. Motivated by the discrepancy between self-reported walking habits and those tracked by the app, we analyze the usage patterns of over 14,000 users across France. Our recorded data suggest that women engage more consistently with the app than men, in terms of opening the app. Both male and female users are sensitive to monetary prizes. While the paper does not report significant gender differences, our results underscore the importance of considering the motives of interaction with health applications as it may impact the implementation of digital health interventions.
Title: The limits to universalism
Abstract:
Surveys, ballot measures, donations, and consumer spending alike reveal a growing concern for the welfare of animals. What is driving this phenomenon? Does it follow a general shift toward more universalist attitudes, or are social preferences for humans and animals substitutes? I propose a representative survey experiment to measure the distribution, interdependence, and determinants of universalist attitudes toward various human or animal out-groups. Attitudes would be elicited in two ways: (1) via reviously validated hypothetical money allocation tasks between an in-group member and an out-group representative; (2) by allowing respondents to make donations to NGOs that focus on a specific out-group. In a between design, subjects would be randomly exposed to two treatments designed to vary the perceived distance to animal out-groups and dynamic norm beliefs about the treatment of animals.
Title: Beyond employment: Exploring the unintended consequences of a welfare-to-work programme for single parents in France
Abstract:
Welfare reforms around the world over the past 30 years have been largely centered around the ”making work pay” narrative, but the evidence of the efficacy of these politics are at best mixed. A strand of recent work shows that monetary incentives to participate in the labour market may simply not be salient or tailored enough to be effective. In this paper, we analyse the French tax-benefit system and show that its schedule and rules creates large variations in implicit tax rate that penalise single mothers on welfare. More precisely, we show that the implicit marginal tax rate is highest specifically on full-time minimum wage incomes, creating a dynamic that we call “assistaxation” : those supposed to be incentivised by public assistance end up unknowingly and disproportionately penalised by the tax-benefit system. Conversely, there is a hole in the marginal tax rate at the half-time minimum wage level, that does not create bunching in the general population. Relying on a randomised experiment of an intensive welfare-to-work programme in France targetting single mothers on long term welfare, we demonstrate that participants’ learning of monetary incentives influenced their choice of working less, and not more. Using instrumental distributional regressions and quantile regressions, we investigate the effect of the programme at the intensive margin recovering the distribution of potential outcomes of treated and untreated compliers. Importantly, monetary incentives are very different by number of children. we show that the distribution of labour incomes for treated compliers bunches at part-time minimum wage levels. The reaction is strongest for the most disincentivised group at the full-time minimum wage level. we also show that treated compliers had other important reactions including re-partnering and de-cohabitation, strongly hinting at how much the tax-benefit system can influence family configuration. Ultimately, all these significant reactions combined yield a precise null effect on the entire distribution of net disposable income per capita : while they marginally optimised their work-life balance, participants are no less poor. These results are robust to various estimation methods including non-parametric data driven instrumental distribution regressions.
Arthur Heim (PSE)
Title: The effects of reminders on engagement and walking: Evidence from a large scale experiment
(co-writing Beatrice Braut and Sarah Zaccagni)
Abstract:
Do reminders on mobile phones promote walking? We investigate this question using a large-scale field experiment on more than 20,187 individuals in France. In collaboration with a step-tracking application, we test how different types of reminders and different extensions of the intervention affect walking habits. We send three types of messages framed to emphasize different behavioral features: sunk cost, peers, and self-comparison. We also vary the duration of the intervention (1 versus 3 weeks) per each of them. First, we document that women walk less than men, but are more committed to using the application. The average number of steps over the intervention period follows a downward trend, likely determined by a seasonal effect. We find heterogeneous treatment effects based on the type of walker: users who walk less than 5,000 steps before the treatment are the ones who benefit more from the messages.
Title: "(Un)Willingness to wait for/learn about the diagnosis, using Discrete Choice Experiments"
Abstract:
The complexity and rarity of rare diseases often lead to unique care pathways characterised by an extended time to diagnosis, which can be caused by various factors from both healthcare providers and patients. In this paper, the focus is on the patient-side effects of diagnostic delays, specifically driven by individual and collective preferences for health information. Additionally, the paper sheds light on future policy interventions aimed at reducing the time to diagnosis. The goal of this paper is to examine how patients, caregivers, and healthcare professionals value diagnostic information and explore ways in which healthcare providers can enhance communication with patients and caregivers, thereby promoting patient adherence and improving overall health outcomes.
Title: "Does others’ health count for peanuts? Health, market returns, and pro-sociality"
Abstract:
Food safety issues are pervasive in low-income countries. Products that are available to local consumers often do not meet health-related standards that are applicable in higher-income countries. In the context of poor regulation, it is necessary to explore potential reasons why farmers might invest in quality production. This paper aims to highlight the channels that might drive farmers to value information about food quality. Through a lab-in-the-field experiment using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism, we elicit the willingness to pay (WTP) for access to groundnut powder with a low level of aflatoxin among Senegalese groundnut farmers. Randomized access to thorough information about aflatoxin is introduced to estimate the effect of information. In our design, the groundnut powder is allocated between three purposes: own consumption, consumption by others, and sale. Preliminary results show that respondents are willing to pay more for their own health but altruistic farmers value equally their health and others'. Information increases respondents' willingness to pay for all purposes.
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