Estimating the Net Benefits of Environmental, Public Health and Safety Regulations

总体而言，改善人类健康、安全和环境的联邦法规避免了数千人死亡，并减少了数十万例非致命伤害，但每年也会造成高达数十亿美元的成本。要成为具有法律约束力的法规，几乎所有高成本法规都必须通过“成本效益测试”：法规避免的损害的货币化价值超过受监管行业和消费者的成本。成本效益分析(CBA)在其对救命收益的货币转换以及如何在数据不完整的情况下估计风险方面一直存在争议，但具有讽刺意味的是，如何量化风险降低和成本对人类福利的影响的机制受到的关注较少。该项目假设，对当前收益和成本评估方法的两次更改可能会改变哪些法规通过或未通过成本效益测试，并改变给定法规的最佳严格程度。首先，对统计生命价值的典型估计故意排除对利他主义的所有考虑，使用估计的私人价值来降低自己死亡的小风险，以评估有益于整个国家的公共项目。其次，CBA隐含地规定，无论一些人是否面临更高的死亡风险，计划的总收益与拯救的生命数量成正比，CBA还只考虑监管的总成本，即使成本对一些企业或消费者造成了不成比例的影响。两个大型调查实验探索了这些简化的假设，并提供了原则性的、定量的替代方案。研究人员通过询问受试者对假设性法规的可取性的感知程度来估计“具有共同目标的统计生命的价值”。在假设性法规中，权衡的规模是强加给每个人的数十亿美元和数千条随机获救的生命，而不是几美元和一条生命的一小部分之间的个人权衡。这项调查还测试(并隔离)了以下两种情况的影响：(1)“家长式”利他主义(关心他人的长寿，即使其他人愿意以较少的监管成本承担更大的风险)与“非家长式”利他主义(考虑其他人的净收益，包括他们的成本)；以及(2)假设权衡既是用户定义的可接受的固定救命成本，也是用户定义的固定监管成本保住的最低生命数。第二项调查测试了这样一种假设，即个人的风险和成本水平可以在不进行分类的情况下在总体上求和(即，个人认为任何水平的风险或成本的福利影响是线性的)，使用受试者对他们认为不同的假设个人伤害概率和不同的个人成本的可怕程度的评级。这个实验揭示了是否存在风险或成本的最低水平，可以明智地四舍五入为零，和/或令人无法忍受的高水平，其影响不仅仅与较低水平的水平成比例。该项目还将联邦政府中的CBA从业者和用户作为两个调查的单独主题组，并以两个研讨会结束，这些官员讨论研究结果，以及增加“共同目的”和对风险和成本的非线性评估是否会改变先前关于哪种监管方案实际上对社会具有最大净效益的重要决定。

Collectively, federal regulations to improve human health, safety, and the environment avert many thousands of deaths, and reduce non-fatal harm by hundreds of thousands of cases, but also impose costs up to billions of dollars annually. To become legally binding, almost all high-cost regulations must pass a "cost-benefit test": the monetized value of the harms averted by the rule exceeds costs to regulated industries and consumers. Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) has been controversial in its monetary translation of life-saving benefits and how to estimate risks with incomplete data, but ironically, the mechanics of how to quantify effects of both risk reduction and cost on human welfare has received less attention. This project presumes that two changes to current methods of benefit and cost valuation might change which regulations pass or fail the cost-benefit test, and alter the optimal level of stringency for a given regulation. First, typical estimates of the value of a statistical life deliberately exclude all consideration of altruism, using the estimated private value of reducing a small risk of one's own death to value public programs benefiting the entire nation. Secondly, CBA implicitly dictates that the total benefit of a program is proportional to the number of lives saved, regardless of whether some people face much higher mortality risks, and CBA also considers only the regulation's total cost, even if costs affect some businesses or consumers disproportionately.Two large survey experiments probe these simplified assumptions and offer principled, quantitative alternatives. The researchers estimate the "value of a statistical life with shared purpose" by querying subjects on the perceived desirability of hypothetical regulations in which the scale of tradeoffs is billions of dollars imposed on everyone and thousands of randomly saved lives, not a personal tradeoff between a few dollars and a tiny fraction of one life. This survey also tests for (and isolates) the effects of: (1) "paternalistic" altruism (concern for others' longevity even if those others would prefer greater risk at less regulatory cost) versus "non-paternalistic" altruism (considering others' net benefits including their costs); and (2) posing tradeoffs as both a user-defined acceptable cost for a fixed number of lives saved and a user-defined minimum number of lives saved for a fixed regulatory cost. A second survey tests the assumption that individual levels of risk and cost can be summed over the population without being disaggregated (i.e., that individuals regard the welfare effects of risk or cost at any level as linear), using subjects' ratings of how dire they view varying hypothetical individual probabilities of harm and varying personal costs. This experiment reveals whether there are de minimus levels of either risk or cost that can sensibly be rounded to zero, and/or intolerably high levels whose effects are not merely proportional to those at lower levels. The project also enlists practitioners and users of CBA in the federal government as a separate subject group for the two surveys, and culminates with two workshops for these officials to discuss research results and whether adding "shared purpose" and nonlinear valuation of risk and cost might have changed important prior decisions about which regulatory option in fact had the greatest net benefit to society.