Agricultural Economics Department
First Advisor
Christopher R. Gustafson
Date of this Version
10-2022
Document Type
Thesis
Citation
A thesis presented to the faculty of the Graduate College at the University of Nebraska in partial fulfillment of requirements for the degree of Master of Science
Major: Agricultural Economics
Under the supervision of Professor Christopher R. Gustafson
Lincoln, Nebraska, October 2022
Abstract
This thesis consists of three chapters. The first chapter introduces the thesis by highlighting a brief review of intertemporal preferences, active consideration of health outcomes, and health prompts during food choices. The introduction paves the way for the following two chapters, which are related, but stand-alone papers.
In the second chapter, we explore a novel question: how does actively considering health outcomes (both current and future) during decision-making affect the nutritional quality of food choices? We explore this question with an online experiment on food choices. Our findings show that active consideration of health outcomes leads to choosing products with high nutritional quality. The results of the second chapter motivate the third chapter, which studies an intervention during decision-making that may influence people’s decision processes.
In the third chapter, we build on the findings of chapter 2 to examine whether a simple message that highlights health impacts of food options leads people to increase the healthiness of food choices. The contribution of this chapter is to examine pathways through which these types of messages act. Specifically, we examine whether the health message changes attention and/or intertemporal preferences. The results show that simple messages during choice increase the consideration of health outcomes but do not change intertemporal preferences. Our findings show that health prompts lead to healthier food choices by increasing consideration of health during choice.
Advisor: Christopher R. Gustafson
Comments
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