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This study reports results of an analysis of consumer responses to news reports of grain‐product contamination by the pesticide ethylene dibromide (EDB). The results demonstrate that it is possible to quantify market disruption related to the dissemination of risk information. Implications include the need for increased awareness among risk managers that public perceptions, regardless of their objective accuracy, can induce real economic costs. Such costs should be considered in designing regulatory and information policies.

A recent comprehensive review of the literature identified a number of facts and principles governing risk communication. This paper evaluates several of these propositions using recent evidence from a field experiment in communicating the risks from radon in homes. At this point in the research, data relates primarily to the response of risk perceptions to different information treatments and different personal characteristics. The effect of various causal factors is sensitive to the particular test of risk perception applied. No information treatment was clearly superior for all tasks. An important implication of these findings is that risk communicators must determine what specific task or tasks the information program should enable people to do.

This study examines the perceived risks and mitigating behavior of Maine households who received new information on their exposures to significant health risks from indoor radon. The observed responses of these households illustrate conceptual issues related to designing an effective risk information program. Despite the involvement of generally well‐motivated homeowners and well‐intentioned researchers and government officials, we conclude that the risk information approach used in Maine failed to induce appropriate, cost‐effective voluntary protection. The results indicate that, after receiving radon test results, information on associated health risks, and suggestions on how to reduce exposures: (1) perceived risks tended to understate objective risks by orders of magnitude, and (2) there was no statistically significant relationship between mitigating behavior and objective risks. These results suggest that the formation of risk perceptions and subsequent behavioral adjustments involve complex interactions among information, contextual, socioeconomic, and psychological variables. Therefore, government programs that seek to reduce health and safety risks with information programs, instead of using more conventional enforced standards, must be crafted very carefully to accommodate this complex process.

We investigated the perceived value of government programs on early-childhood development as a means of reducing childhood poverty. We incorporated preferences for the process as well as the outcome by developing two stated-preference survey instruments. One survey directly elicited respondents' willingness to pay specifically for high-quality, intensive, early-childhood development programs at federal and state levels. A second survey elicited respondents' preferences for increasing or decreasing taxes and reallocating expenditures between other government programs and early-childhood programs. We found that respondents cared greatly about how childhood poverty was reduced, not just reducing poverty per se. The perceived effectiveness of a program and ideological perspective were found to be important determinants of preferences for a poverty-reduction program. Respondents across all groups, including conservatives and respondents who perceived the effectiveness of early-childhood programs to be low, were not in favor of reducing the early-childhood program.

Weinvestigatedtheperceivedvalueofgovernmentprogramsonearly- childhood development as a means of reducing childhood poverty. We incorpo- rated preferences for the process as well as the outcome by developing two stated- preference survey instruments. One survey directly elicited respondents' willing- ness to pay specifically for high-quality, intensive, early-childhood development programs at federal and state levels. A second survey elicited respondents' pref- erences for increasing or decreasing taxes and reallocating expenditures between other government programs and early-childhood programs. We found that respon- dents cared greatly about how childhood poverty was reduced, not just reducing poverty per se. The perceived effectiveness of a program and ideological perspec- tive were found to be important determinants of preferences for a poverty-reduction program. Respondents across all groups, including conservatives and respondents who perceived the effectiveness of early-childhood programs to be low, were not in favor of reducing the early-childhood program.

This article examines economic and legal constraints that determine whose losses are included in natural resource damages as a result of an oil spill or hazardous‐substance release. For example, the article describes the circumstances under which use losses experienced by young children would not be included in natural resource damages. With respect to nonuse damages, the article advocates excluding the expressed losses of people who have no knowledge of the specific natural resources affected by a spill/release and who are unaware that the natural resources were injured. In the absence of such knowledge and awareness, these people could not have experienced a welfare loss. Finally, the article discusses legal constraints on whose losses count in natural resource damages with respect to statutory exclusions, public versus private uses of natural resources, uses of natural resources by foreigners, and damages in the absence of injuries.

The transfer study, a technique used in cost-benefit analysis, is an increasingly important tool used by government agencies to assess environmental regulatory policy. This innovative book develops protocols for using the transfer method to approach environmental problems and introduces several significant conceptual and methodological advances that refine the transfer process. The transfer approach to quantitative policy analysis adapts information and data from existing studies and so provides an economical way to assess potential benefits and costs for projects. The book presents a detailed framework for examining the transfer of information, outlines the basic steps of the method, and discusses solutions to frequently encountered problems. It then illustrates the method with an extensive case study of environmental externalities from electricity generation. This case study provides the opportunity to discuss salient aspects of the transfer method in more detail, including conceptual principles, the quality of original studies, empirical difficulties and estimation techniques. It also demonstrates the use of state-of-the-art techniques such as meta analysis to synthesise and transfer information from multiple studies and assesses the reliability of the transfer estimates with repeated computer simulations, a technique known as Monte Carlo analysis. Environmental Policy Analysis with Limited Information will appeal to environmental policy analysts and managers as well as environmental economists

Measuring nonuse values is one of the most controversial topics facing environmental economists today. One important issue that has received little attention is determining who has economic standing with respect to nonuse losses from natural resource injuries. In this paper, a conceptual model for determining compensable nonuse losses is developed that is consistent with the Kaldor‐Hicks principle of potential Pareto improvement, and then that model is applied to the results of a telephone survey on industrial water pollution in the lower Passaic River in northern New Jersey. One proposition from this model indicates that only people who have knowledge of the injured resource (i.e., 10 to 44 percent of respondents) can incur a compensable nonuse loss. A second proposition from the model indicates that demand for information about an injury to a familiar resource is a necessary condition for compensable nonuse losses. It was found that 81 percent of the respondents who were familiar with the lower Passaic River were likely to read, listen to, or watch a news story about the river. However, far fewer respondents familiar with the lower Passaic River were willing to engage in more active, and costly, information‐acquisition activities (such as conducting research at the library and attending public meetings). Finally, the model suggests that geographic proximity to nondescript resources may affect nonuse values, information costs, or both, helping define the potentially affected population. The empirical results for the lower Passaic River support this third proposition. The overall conclusion is that only a small fraction of the population in New Jersey and New York might reasonably experience a nonuse loss as a result of industrial water pollution in the lower Passaic River.

Understanding patient‐specific differences in risk tolerance for new treatments that offer improved efficacy can assist in making difficult regulatory and clinical decisions for new treatments that offer both the potential for greater effectiveness in relieving disease symptoms, but also risks of disabling or fatal side effects. The aim of this study is to elicit benefit‐risk trade‐off preferences for hypothetical treatments with varying efficacy and risk levels using a stated‐choice (SC) survey. We derive estimates of "maximum acceptable risk" (MAR) that can help decisionmakers identify welfare‐enhancing alternatives. In the case of children, parent caregivers are responsible for treatment decisions and their risk tolerance may be quite different than adult patients' own tolerance for treatment‐related risks. We estimated and compared the willingness of Crohn's disease (CD) patients and parents of juvenile CD patients to accept serious adverse event (SAE) risks in exchange for symptom relief. The analyzed data were from 345 patients over the age of 18 and 150 parents of children under the age of 18. The estimation results provide strong evidence that adult patients and parents of juvenile patients are willing to accept tradeoffs between treatment efficacy and risks of SAEs. Parents of juvenile CD patients are about as risk tolerant for their children as adult CD patients are for themselves for improved treatment efficacy. SC surveys provide a systematic method for eliciting preferences for benefit‐risk tradeoffs. Understanding patients' own risk perceptions and their willingness to accept risks in return for treatment benefits can help inform risk management decision making.