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Intertemporal Choice Health

Meaning

Intertemporal Choice Health is a concept from behavioral economics that analyzes how individuals make decisions involving trade-offs between immediate, smaller health rewards and delayed, larger health benefits. It focuses on the psychological phenomenon of temporal discounting, where the value of a future health outcome is discounted relative to a present one. Understanding this bias is essential because many critical health behaviors, such as exercising or saving for retirement, require sacrificing present comfort for future well-being. This framework helps explain non-adherence to long-term health plans.