Decision-making and Obesity Policy: Self-control, Mental Accounting, and Menu Labels

Self-control, or willpower, can be thought of as a person's capacity to make short-term choices while attending to long-term goals. Evidence exists of its importance in many domains including health, wealth, crime, and happiness. Recent studies specifically point to a direct relationship between low self-control and unhealthy weight and obesity, but they are limited in their sample sizes or control variables. In addition, they do not consider a potentially impactful phenomenon known as mental accounting (MA) , which is believed to be a relative of self-control. This dissertation looks at self-control and MA as they relate to food choice and body-mass index or obesity. Study One uses data from a large panel to examine the roles played by one's family and one's school in the self-control-obesity relationship. Results show that self-control no longer predicts body-mass index or obesity when family fixed effects are added to the models. What this tells us is that something occurring at the family-level -- shared genes, parenting style, etc. -- might confound the individual-level self-control-obesity relationship, or that individual self-control mediates the family environment-obesity relationship. This finding not only has implications for where to target public programs, but it also adds information to a debate surrounding personal responsibility and weight bias or stigma. Studies Two and Three collect unique survey data that explore MA, a component of decision-making that is relatively understudied in general, across domains, and in particular as it relates to health. Findings suggest that levels of self-control and of MA complement one another, and that individual MA intensity differs across money and food but not across demographic characteristics. MA intensity is not associated with body-mass index or being at one's perceived optimal weight. On the other hand, we find that it is related to the extents to which people notice and use menu and nutrition labels. In addition, results from discrete choice experiments provide some evidence that incorporating MA concepts into menu label framing can increase their effectiveness, i.e., reduce the total number of calories that an individual chooses. Raising awareness by educating consumers and policymakers about MA could address self-control problems that contribute to failures to achieve long-term health and non-health goals alike.