A note on the relationship between health-risk attitude and monetary-risk attitude

Abstract

Most decisions in medicine are made under conditions of uncertainty and involve the assessment of risk. Knowing a person's risk attitude can contribute to better health care decision-making. However, assessing individual attitudes to health-risk is more complex than assessing their attitude to monetary-risk. The aim of this article is to explore the relationship between monetary- and health-risk attitudes. The article is based on data collected from a study of 593 higher education students using a questionnaire measuring and comparing attitudes to health and monetary risks. This article focuses on two key questions: participants' responses to two standard gamble questions, one relating to health in terms of life years and the other to monetary risk. The analysis of these data examined the association between health-risk attitude (life years' gamble) and monetary-risk attitude (monetary gamble) as reflected by the certainty equivalents of both gambles. The researchers found a significant positive Spearman correlation between an individual's attitude towards monetary-risks and attitude towards health-risks. A forecasting model (ordinal regression) enabled the prediction of the probability of a person's attitude to health-risk given the monetary-risk attitude. The association between monetary risk (which is measurable) and health-risk is significant. They concluded that there was a positive association between participants' health- and monetary-risk attitudes.