Economic Measures

To-Do List

 

Introduction

Our work developing this methodology is still relatively early; we’ve completed one prototyping effort and applied it to three companies. We see this as just the beginning. We have a long to-do list – more than we can take on – and we’d love for other researchers to join us in using this methodology, and others, to estimate the societal costs that are generated by the products and services of many companies. Specifically, we are looking to apply the methodology to more companies, representing different types of products, continue to improve the methodology, and to see more relevant research conducted.

 

Application to Other Companies

Our likely next steps, depending on funding, are to apply the methodology to estimate costs for additional companies similar to those we prototyped – quick service restaurants like Burger King and video streaming services like Netflix. Food and beverage manufacturers and supermarket chains could also be analyzed using techniques similar to what we used for Burger King.

 

Methodological Enhancements

We see a number of exciting opportunities to refine and extend the methodology:

  • Reconciling the different timelines of product exposure and disease experience. Most chronic diseases result from years of exposure to a product and the resulting costs can be lifelong. When estimating a company’s annual cost impact, one could imagine present-day costs resulting from the company’s impact over many years previous, or future costs resulting from exposure that happens in the present year. Or some combination of the two. We’re eager to learn of different techniques to model this complexity.

  • Expanding into other societal costs. Our work to date has only included direct health care costs – based on the annual incremental costs associated with patients that are diagnosed with a particular disease or condition. But there are other societal costs, including lost productivity of people who have the disease and environmental impacts associated with the company’s operations. Folding these other costs into the overall calculation could bring the estimates closer to overall societal cost.

  • Integrating children into the analyses. Due to information gaps and complexity, we focused our analyses on adults in the US, but children and youth under 20 are major consumers of popular products and services and thus their health is influenced by them. We’d love to hear ideas for modeling these long-term impacts.

  • Estimating the distribution of product sales for quick service restaurants. Restaurants have a variety of items on their menu that vary both by nutritional value and popularity. For Burger King, we modeled their nutritional impact by analyzing nutrition information for a basket of the combo meals featured most prominently on their website. It’s likely much closer to reality than simply averaging across all menu items, but we’d love to see even better ways to approximate the distribution of menu items sold.

 
 

Additional Research

Estimating societal costs from corporate impacts on health requires evidence – most importantly evidence for the quantitative relationships between use of a given product or service and a health behavior that can be a risk or protective factor for a given chronic disease. For example, in our prototyping work, we relied on evidence that showed links between Pokémon GO use and both physical activity and sleep duration. 

There are many types of products that could be analyzed for their impacts on societal costs due to their influences on their customers’ health behaviors. These include social media platforms, video and computer games, AI chatbots/companions, automobiles, ride-hailing services, bicycles, e-bikes, scooters and more. In order to analyze them, there is a need for studies that connect them to behaviors like diet, physical activity, sedentary time, sleep duration or quality, social connectedness and time spent outdoors.

We have found many studies that linked consumption of different nutrients (sodium, sugar, and dietary fiber), physical activity, sleep duration and television viewing to increased or decreased risks of developing certain chronic diseases: cardiovascular disease; depression; hypertension; obesity; and type 2 diabetes. There is a need for studies that explore the relationships among other behaviors – most notably those related to social connection and time spent outdoors and in nature.