Are People Willing to Pay to Prevent Natural Disasters?
Abstract:
We implement a survey experiment to study whether awareness of the consequences of hydrog eological risk affects people’s willingness to fight it. To do so, we lever age a representative panel of 5,000 Italian individuals interviewed at quar terly frequency, starting in October 2023. We elicit survey participants’ w illingness to contribute to a public fund to finance investment to secure a reas exposed to hydrogeological risk under different information treatments . We find that disclosing information about the consequences of hydrogeolog ical risk causes individuals to increase both support for public funding an d individual willingness to pay for the policy. Compared to the control gro up, individuals exposed to the treatment were 9 percentage points more like ly to contribute to the fund and more willing to contribute an additional € 29. Applying the information treatment to the whole working age population could raise as much as €0.26 billion per year. We provide evidence that ind ividual willingness to pay depends on individual knowledge that the success of the policy depends critically on the willingness to pay of other citize ns.
DTSTAMP:20260617T210958Z DTSTART:20240712T010000Z DTEND:20240712T140000Z SEQUENCE:0 TRANSP:OPAQUE END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR