Applying decision-making approaches to health risk-taking behaviors: Progress and remaining challenges

This paper critically examines how risk-taking behaviors can be modeled fro m a decision-making: perspective. We first review several applications of a decision perspective to the study of risk-taking behaviors, including stud ies that investigate consequence generation and the components of the overa ll utility (i.e., consequence, desirability, and likelihood) of risk-laking and studies that investigate the validity of two decision-oriented models (subjective expected utility and the theory of reasoned action) in predicti ng risk-taking behaviors. We then discuss challenges in modeling risk-takin g behaviors from a decision-making perspective. These challenges include (i ) finding the factors that are necessary to improve the predictability of m odels, (ii) difficulties in eliciting the individual components of overall utility, and (iii) incorporating overall utility changes over time. (C) 199 9 Academic Press.