While one might expect athletes to be strongly averse to extending their career too long when there is a chance of losing everything due to a concussion or a catastrophic injury, experimental subjects consistently played longer than the optimal amount for risk-neutral decisions. A commitment to...

The gap between willingness-to-pay (WTP) and willingness-to-accept (WTA) benefit values typifies situations in which reference points — and direction of movement from reference points — are consequential. Why WTA-WTP discrepancies arise is not well understood. We generalize models of...

The 2014 GM ignition switch recall highlighted the inadequacies of the company's safety culture and the shortcomings of regulatory sanctions. The company's inattention to systematic thinking about product safety can be traced to the hostile treatment of corporate risk analyses by the courts....

General patterns of bias in risk beliefs are well established in the literature, but much less is known about how these biases vary across the population. Using a sample of almost 500 people, the regression analysis in this paper yields results consistent with the well established pattern that...

Risk equity serves as the purported rationale for a wide range of inefficient policy practices, such as the concern that hypothetical individual risks not be too great. This paper proposes an alternative risk equity concept in terms of equitable tradeoffs rather than equity in risk levels....

A sample of almost 500 jury-eligible citizens considered a series of experimental situation involving accidents. The juror sample did not properly apply negligence rules, as their errors were particularly great for low probability-large loss cases. They also penalized corporations for...

This article examines the rationality of seatbelt usage using an original data set of 465 adult respondents. People with high stated values of statistical life, who do not smoke, and who have risk beliefs that are highly elastic with respect to actual risks are more likely to use seatbelts, as...

The value of a statistical life (VSL) monetizes the expected loss in well-being associated with the risk of death. The utility loss resulting from a fatality is central to the empirical framework for estimating the VSL. The VSL trajectory over the life cycle exhibits an inverted-U shape,...

Data from three surveys before and after the 2022 mass shootings in Buffalo and Uvalde provide a natural experiment to assess perceptions and valuations of mass shootings. The degree of overestimation of mass shooting risks surged following these tragedies. The odds of believing that mass...