Risky health choices and the Balloon Economic Risk Protocol

We describe a risk protocol that combines the rigor of economic studies of risk with the ecological validity of tasks from psychology. Despite a wealth of experimental contributions on risk preferences, stemming from a variety of elicitation tasks, the external validity of standard measures of risk is questionable. In this study we focus on a risk task – the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART) – which is highly successful in predicting health-related risk behaviors such as alcohol use, drug use, smoking, unprotected sex, driving without a seatbelt, and stealing. The BART is not commonly used by economic scholars because of concerns that participants may not adequately comprehend uncertainty associated with the task and because of the resulting difficulty in relating participants’ choices to standard risk models. To answer these concerns and build on associations with real world risk, we designed a modified BART, which we will refer to as the Balloon Economic Risk Protocol (BERP). In this protocol, participants observe the distribution of pop points prior to the task to create a more consistent knowledge base. We then use a belief elicitation technique to produce a user-generated prior distribution of balloon pops. Using these measures, we compare participants’ behavior to the expected-value optimum to provide a link to standard models of risk. In accordance with past economic literature, we found that participants’ BERP-generated risk preferences revealed mild risk aversion on average, and correlated with a self-report questionnaire on drinking, drug use, and smoking behavior.