Roles of Financial and Nonfinancial Incentives in Health Promotion
Incentives in the monetary or nonmonetary forms have been widely used in health promotion programs. With the recent health policy environment, more support has become available in promoting incentivized preventive health care and public health interventions. However the roles of incentives in promoting health behaviors are still not well understood even though economic theory suggests the expected positive influence. One classic example is the puzzling observations of the low participation rate of incentivized worksite weight loss programs among eligible employees. This session aims at tackling this challenge from three different perspectives: examine the incentive effects in understudied service area; systematic exploration of incentive design; and psychological factors’ influence. The first paper explores the financial incentives’ role in home-based health monitoring (an understudied health service) using a first-hand data collected from a randomized control trial. Different variations of financial incentives are compared. The second paper steps back at looking how different designs of incentives (i.e., types, magnitude, reward frequency and contingency) affects people’s willingness to participate in incentivized weight loss programs to inform better incentive arm design. The third paper takes on the psychology lens to look at how personality traits can be related to body weights and confirm the correlation heterogeneity. It is a first step study to lead to different incentive designs by psychology factors. It also further explores how measurement errors in self-reported data cause bias in policy insights gained.