Abstract: Time preference for health, which is related to individual and national health, is an omnipresent and important issue. However, the study of this field still stay at the stage of referring to the relevant theoretical models and methods of the time preferences for traditional money domain. Given to the domain-specificity of time preference for health domain, these theoretical models and methods has caused both inconsistent methods and results in the field. In the past decades, this field focus on the behavioral consequences of time preference for health. Most studies have reported that low temporal discount rate and high future time perspective are positively interrelated with health protection behaviors and negatively interrelated with health risk behaviors. This field also focuses on the key impact factors of time preference for health including the features of decision-making object and decision makers. In the future, decision-making models and measurement paradigms applicable to the time preferences for health domain should be developed, the relationship between healthy behaviors and time preference should be identified, and the internal mechanism of the intertemporal decision-making process for health should be studied. Future researchers should also explore interventions for health behavior and the application of healthcare policies.

Key words: time preferences, health behavior, domain independence, time perspective