Willingness to pay for reductions in health risks when probabilities are distorted
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Measuring the Subjective Value of Risky and Ambiguous Options using Experimental Economics and Functional MRI Methods
Published on: September 19, 2012
Han Bleichrodt1, Louis Eeckhoudt
1Department of Economics, Erasmus University, Rotterdam, The Netherlands. bleichrodt@few.eur.nl
Abstract:
We study the willingness to pay for reductions in health risks when people do not evaluate probabilities linearly, as is commonly assumed in elicitations of willingness to pay, but weight probabilities, as is commonly observed in empirical studies of decision under risk. We show that for the levels of baseline risk typically considered, probability weighting strongly affects willingness to pay estimates and may lead to unstable monetary valuations of health.
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