Asymmetries in the Valuation of Risk and the Siting of Hazardous Waste Disposal Facilities
通过波士顿郊区的家庭调查，发现人们为降低风险愿意支付更多，但为避免同等风险增加却支付更少，这种不对称性挑战了传统经济模型，对危险废物设施选址等政策有重要启示。
Recently several economists (Richard Thaler, 1980; Jack Knetsch and J. A. Sinden, 1984), following suggestions of psychologists (Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, 1979), have argued that current economic models of consumer behavior fail to explain observed asymmetries in how individuals respond to gain vs. losses in perceived entitlements. Attention to their arguments is increasing because they relate to many current policy issues-especially those associated with undesirable land uses. Most of the papers suggesting this limitation with the conventional economic framework have been motivated by the large differences between the estimates of willingness to pay vs. willingness to accept as measures of the change in individual well-being that would result from a change in the conditions of access to (or the quality of) a commodity.' In this paper we report the first evidence of a sizable property rights effect using only willingness-to-pay measures. This change is potentially important because both the recent appraisal of contingent valuation surveys (see Ronald Cummings et al.. 1986), an important source of the available empirical evidence, and laboratory experiments suggest that individuals may have difficulty in dealing with the concept of compensation. This is especially true when there is no opportunity for individuals to learn about transactions that involve compensation through experience. Based on a contingent valuation survey of households in suburban Boston, we found that respondents bid significantly more to reduce risk than they indicated they were willing to pay to avoid an equivalent risk increase. While our findings support suggestions that changes in the implied entitlements (to safety) can lead to large differences in welfare measures for risk changes, several of these earlier arguments would have implied that individuals were willing to pay more to avoid a risk increase-the opposite to our results. Thus, these differences imply that the determinants of individuals' valuations for risk changes are more complex than past studies have acknowledged.