Coping with Risk: The Role of Insurance, Compensation and Protective Behavior

个人、公司、消费者、公民团体、政府、监管机构和法院做出的许多决定都涉及在潜在的不幸或灾难发生之前--通过保险、风险规避行为或承担风险的补偿--或在它们发生后通过私人或政府补偿来处理它们。这些决定往往显得不一致、不公平或不合理。保险公司对未来的赔偿不确定，拒绝提供针对某些风险的保单，因为他们的决定是基于最坏的情况。个体对风险的反应不一致，对待小风险就好像它们不存在(没有系安全带或没有采取预防艾滋病的措施)，或者大到压倒所有其他考虑因素(反对基因重组)。政府对这类关切作出回应的努力往往是临时的，例如德莱尼修正案，导致了意想不到的矛盾结果。这个合作的跨学科研究项目在研究决策中的偏见和谬误的多学科传统中检查这些令人费解的行为特征。它调查了这些偏见是否扭曲了机构、市场和社会资源分配的运作。这项研究将开发和评估几种旨在纠正决策偏见或保护个人免受其影响的方法，包括教育、提供信息的新颖方式，以及将激励和监管与保险和补偿相结合的混合战略。该研究计划将偏差分为四类：参照点效应，其中对结果的偏好取决于它们被比较的内容；或有权重，其中选择取决于表达决定的方式；决策规则，其中绝对优先考虑一个属性(例如，节省资金，避免灾难性后果)；门槛效应，即小风险或小成本(例如，一支香烟的风险或低免赔额保险的额外成本)即使重复发生，也完全被忽视。这项研究将考察这些偏见是否会影响提供或购买保险、设定保费、补偿不幸的受害者、预先补偿人们的不幸风险以及从事保护行为的决定。将使用多种方法，包括问卷调查、实验室研究、实验市场、过程跟踪、实地研究和微观经济分析。这些结果将涉及心理学、经济学和决策理论中关于偏差与实际决策的相关性、市场竞争是否会减少偏差的影响以及偏差本身的性质的理论争论。

Many decisions made by individuals, firms, consumers, citizens' groups, governments, regulatory bodies and courts involve dealing with potential misfortunes or catastrophes before they occur-- through insurance, risk avoidance behavior, or compensation for risk bearing-- or after they occur--through private or government compensation. These decisions often appear to be inconsistant, inequitable or irrational. Insurers, uncertain about future awards, refuse to offer policies against certain risks because they base their decisions on worst-case scenarios. Individuals react to risks inconsistently, treating small risks as though they were nonexistent (failing to wear seatbelts or to take precautions against AIDS) or so large as to overwhelm all other considerations (opposition to genetic recombination). Governmental attempts to respond to such concerns are often ad- hoc, such as the Delaney amendment, resulting in unanticipated contradictory outcomes. This collaborative interdisciplinary research program examines these puzzling features of behavior within a multi-disciplinary tradition of research on biases and fallacies in decision making. It investigates the question of whether these biases distort the functioning of institutions, markets and societal allocation of resources. The research will develop and evaluate several approaches designed to correct decision biases or protect individuals from their effects, including education, novel ways of presenting information, and mixed strategies coupling incentives and regulations with insurance and compensation. The research plan organizes biases into four categories: reference-point effects, in which preferences for outcomes depend on what they are compared to; contingent weighting, in which choice depends on the way in which a decision is expressed; decision rules, in which absolute priority is given to one attribute (e.g. saving money, avoiding catastrophic consequences); and threshold effects, in which small risks or costs (e.g. the risk of one cigarette or the extra cost of low- deductible insurance) are totally ignored even if they are repeated. The research will examine whether such biases affect decisions about offering or purchasing insurance, setting premiums, compensating victims of misfortune, compensating people for the risk of misfortune beforehand, and engaging in protective behavior. Multiple methods will be used, including questionnaires, laboratory studies, experimental markets, process-tracing, field studies, and microeconomic analysis. The results will bear on theoretical controversies within psychology, economics and decision theory about the relevance of biases to real decision making, on the question of whether market competition reduces the effects of bias, and on questions about the nature of bias itself.