Applying Decision-Making Approaches to Health Risk-Taking Behaviors: Progress and Remaining Challenges

This paper critically examines how risk-taking behaviors can be modeled from a decision-making perspective. We first review several applications of a decision perspective to the study of risk-taking behaviors, including studies that investigate consequence generation and the components of the overall utility (i.e., consequence, desirability, and likelihood) of risk-taking and studies that investigate the validity of two decision-oriented models (subjective expected utility and the theory of reasoned action) in predicting risk-taking behaviors. We then discuss challenges in modeling risk-taking behaviors from a decision-making perspective. These challenges include (i) finding the factors that are necessary to improve the predictability of models, (ii) difficulties in eliciting the individual components of overall utility, and (iii) incorporating overall utility changes over time. Copyright 1999 Academic Press.