Using survey-based choice experiments, we find that willingness to pay (WTP) for cap-and-trade programs depends upon their distributional impacts, including changes in the numbers of carbon-intensive versus green jobs and whether there will be additional regulations to limit non-global co-pollutant emissions from firms that buy permits. We estimate a model suitable for out-of-sample forecasting of WTP in other regions nationally, where systematic heterogeneity is captured by predicted county-level climate-change attitudes from the Yale Climate Map project.
We review a wide selection of published papers that rely on stated preference methods to reveal the tradeoffs that people are willing to make to protect either individual wild bird species, categories of species (guilds), or the habitats upon which these species rely. We focus on the features of these studies that make them more or less suitable for 'benefits-function transfer,' where the policy-related usefulness of the original research can be multiplied by transferring the estimated models to predict benefits associated with other types of wild birds in other regions.
Several universities have implemented, and numerous others are considering, internal carbon fee or pricing programs intended to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, finance carbon reduction programs, signal sustainability and/or prepare for future mandatory carbon reductions. We employ survey-based choice experiments concerning potential internal carbon-pricing programs at a flagship public university.
We revisit a 2003 general-population survey designed to determine people’s willingness to bear the costs of public policies to reduce illnesses and avoid premature deaths in their communities. We re-estimate earlier models, omitting all respondent-specific characteristics and adding new county-level data on a variety of contextual variables circa 2003. Then we transfer this model to the context of the 2020-21 COVID-19 pandemic, substituting 2020-era levels of the contextual variables.
The survey instrument for this stated-preference choice experiment includes enough abundance information about individual species of regionally common backyard birds to permit the calculation of a variety of alternative biodiversity measures. The choice tasks in our choice experiment each specifically describe the consequences of the policy for five of the top 25 backyard bird species in the respondent's region, as well as the average effects on all other common backyard species in the area.
We estimate a utility-theoretic choice model to quantify demand for publicly provided medical treatment policies. We find diminishing marginal utility for increased recoveries and avoided premature deaths. Willingness to pay for different types of treatment policies varies with who would benefit, with each respondent's own characteristics, community ethnic fractionalization and immigrant composition, as well as the respondent's expected private benefits from the policy, attitude toward government interventions and overall health care funding priorities.
A choice model based on utility in a sequence of prospective future health states permits us to generalize the concept of the value of statistical life (VSL). Our representative national survey asks individuals to choose between costly risk-reducing programs and the status quo in randomized stated choice scenarios. Our model allows for separate marginal utilities for discounted net income and avoided illness years, post-illness years, and lost life-years. Our estimates permit calculation of overall willingness to pay to reduce risks for a wide variety of different prospective illness profiles. These can be benchmarked against the standard VSL as a special case.
In a survey about health risk reductions, we also collect data about individual time preferences using a choice about payout options for hypothetical lottery winnings.We model individual discount rates as a function of age, other socio-demographic variables and variables to capture health expectations. For older subjects, undesirable current health behaviors are better predicted by their back-casted discount rates at age 21. Changing time preferences as people mature may lead to the development of health habits while they are young that are likely to be inconsistent with the preferences of their older future selves.
Survey respondents may assume that the substantive alternative(s) in an SP choice set, in their own particular case, will be different from what the survey instrument describes. We demonstrate a strategy to control and correct for scenario adjustment in the estimation of willingness to pay for a non-market good, using data from follow-up questions, and ex post econometric controls, for each respondent's subjective departures from the intended choice scenario.
Information about preferences for treatment and prevention policies can help policy makers more effectively allocate public health resources. We estimate a random utility model of preferences for treatment and prevention policies and explore sources of systematic heterogeneity in preferences. Marginal utility associated with avoided deaths is about twice as high for prevention policies as for treatment policies, and there is significant heterogeneity with respect to disease type, the group targeted by the policy, and respondent characteristics.