Demand by adults for programs which reduce their own health risks is influenced by (1) their parenthood status, (2) the numbers of children in different age brackets, (3) the ages of the adults themselves, (4) the latency period before they would fall ill, and (5) whether there will still be children in the household at that time. For younger adults, willingness to pay by parents is greater than for non-parents, and increases with each additional young child. For middle-aged adults, willingness to pay for corresponding risk reductions is lower when teenagers are present.
We estimate demand for environmental polices to improve health, using choice experiments concerning community-lvel illnesses and premature deaths avoided, policy duration, and the affected population size. Preferences for policy attributes vary systematically with the scenario design, with the source of risk and type of health threat, and with respondent characteristics. Omission of illness information biases upwards the value of avoided premature deaths, and individuals view avoided deaths and avoided illnesses as substitutes.
We assess whether samples of respondents drawn from large internet consumer panels are representative of the underlying population. We model the attrition/selection process for a major consumer panel maintained by Knowledge Networks, Inc (KN). Starting from KN’s over 525,000 random-digitdialed (RDD) panel-recruitment telephone contact attempts, and ending with a sample of respondents to an actual online survey, we span all junctures at which systematic selection could occur.
Individuals’ demands for programs targeting a particular illness are higher when there is a history of that illness and when subjective risks are higher. A history of other illnesses and greater other-illness subjective risks decrease demand. These comorbidity effects operate through the marginal utilities of both (i) adverse health states and (ii) income.
Seven independent samples of survey respondents were asked to value the identical good. Elicitation methods include one actual purchase and six widely used hypothetical choice formats. Using a common underlying indirect utility function (and stochastic structure) allows data for different elicitation methods to be used independently, compared pair-wise (as in much of the earlier literature) or pooled across all samples in one unified model.
A model of recreation demand is developed to determine the role of water levels in determining participation at and frequency of trips taken to various federal reservoirs and rivers in the Columbia River Basin. Contingent behavior data are required to break the near-perfect multicollinearities among water levels at some waters.