"The NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health provides summaries of publications like this. You can sign up to receive the NBER Bulletin on Aging and Health by email. While conducting empirical work, researchers sometimes observe changes in behavior before the adoption of a new treatment program or...

When SARS struck Taiwan in the spring of 2003, many people feared that the disease would spread through the healthcare system. As a result, outpatient medical visits fell by over 30 percent in the course of a few weeks. This paper examines how both public information (SARS incidence reports) and...

When SARS struck Taiwan in the spring of 2003, many people feared that the disease would spread through the healthcare system. As a result, outpatient medical visits fell by over 30 percent in the course of a few weeks. This paper examines how both public information (SARS incidence reports) and...

People often behave in ways that are clearly detrimental to their health. We review representative research on unhealthy behaviors within a parsimonious framework, the Hot-Cold Decision Triangle. Through this framework, we describe how when people embrace colder state reasoning — instead of...