Sensitivity (proportionality) of willingness to pay to (small) risk changes is often used as a criterion to test for valid measures of economic preferences. In a contingent valuation (CV) study conducted in Austria in February 2005 1,005 respondents were asked their willingness to pay (WTP) for preventing an increase in risk by 1/42,500 and 3/42,500, respectively. WTP for the higher risk variation is significantly higher than WTP for the lower risk change. We find evidence that those respondents who have personal experience with avalanches combine the information about future risk increase, provided in the survey, with the observed number of mortal avalanche accidents in the past. The proportionality of WTP holds if such prior experiences are taken into account and the influence of attitudinal factors in scope tests are controlled for.
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Paper provided by Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in its series Working Papers with number
2006.90.
References listed on IDEAS Please report citation or reference errors to , or , if you are the registered author of the cited work, log in to your RePEc Author Service profile, click on "citations" and make appropriate adjustments.:
Carson, Richard T. & Hanemann, W. Michael, 2006.
"Contingent Valuation,"
Handbook of Environmental Economics,
in: K. G. Mäler & J. R. Vincent (ed.), Handbook of Environmental Economics, edition 1, volume 2, chapter 17, pages 821-936
Elsevier.
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