Incentivizing Healthy Behaviors
This session presents new evidence on the conditions under which positive financial incentives promote healthy behavior. Despite a large literature on the topic, substantial uncertainty remains about how the design of demand-side incentive programs affects recipients’ decisions. The papers reveal how incentives alter the risky health behaviors of recipients, including sexual behavior, the propensity to be screened, and consumption of addictive and unhealthy goods. Moreover, the papers address critical design issues, including the importance of the conditionality in conditional incentive programs, the interaction of incentives with the choice environment, and the benefits schedule. We expect that the audience will come away with a greater appreciation of how design elements can modify the incentive effects.