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

Arbeitspapier

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.

Object Details

• Language: Englisch

References and Relationships

• Bibliographic citation: Series: CEBI Working Paper Series ; No. 29/20

Classification and Topics

• Classification: Wirtschaft ; Field Experiments ; Micro-Based Behavioral Economics: Role and Effects of Psychological, Emotional, Social, and Cognitive Factors on Decision Making‡ ; Health Behavior
• Subject: time preferences ; medication adherence ; field experiment

Contributors, Places and Time

• Event: Geistige Schöpfung
• (who): Gravert, Christina ; Barron, Kai ; Damgaard, Mette Trier ; Norrgren, Lisa
• Event: Veröffentlichung
• (who): University of Copenhagen, Department of Economics, Center for Economic Behavior and Inequality (CEBI)
• (where): Copenhagen
• (when): 2020

Further information

• Handle: http://hdl.handle.net/10419/258943
• Last update: 10.03.2025, 11:44 AM CET