Dietary Behavior and Health Outcomes

Abstract

How do people choose the level of food to consume considering four important elements, namely, utility from health, health effects of food, hedonic utility from food, and diet restraint costs? The authors model dietary choice as dual-self in a principal-agent framework. The principal is concerned with long-term consequences of dietary choices, whereas the agent is in pursuit of the short-term pleasure from food consumption. Firstly, it incorporates impulsivity, an important element, which turns out to be directly related to the principal's utility from health discounted by the agent's disutility from the same health objective. A health objective could be a particular body mass index (BMI), for example. The authors show that the more distant the goal the more impulsive the individual would be. Secondly, with simple manipulations, this model gives insights into observed consumption behavior in different scenarios. When they eliminate the impulsive component from the model, results are consistent with neoclassical economic theory.