Collaborative Research: Informal risk-sharing and private initiative to mitigate local environmental risks

对于美国成千上万的社区来说，自然或污染的环境对人类健康构成了挑战。这些风险往往高度局部化，因此是可以避免的。许多美国人依赖井水，而井水往往低于《安全饮用水法》规定的标准。减少污染物的一种方法是依靠政府来减轻这些风险，并通过提供当地公共产品（包括安全饮用水和卫生服务）来减少不利后果对福利的影响。然而，政府提供的这种公益并不总是足够的。这一项目的基本假设是，可以通过以下方式克服这些限制：（a）利用私人风险实现更大的合作，以罗尔斯的“无知之幕”概念为基础，促进为公共利益而进行的合作;（B）只注重分享私人拥有的资源，避免公共利益或私人利益的极端陷阱;以及（c）探讨信息和社会网络如何加强合作以及鼓励私人投资于缓解技术。为了验证这些概念，研究人员选择了一个自然灾害的背景：孟加拉国数百万私人威尔斯井抽取的地下水中砷的有毒含量。提供关于个人风险的资料，在这种情况下是砷的水井测试，其方式鼓励通过分享安全威尔斯井和安装新的安全威尔斯井加强合作和投资。这些发现对美国的环境政策产生了影响，因为关于水，空气和土壤质量的高分辨率数据越来越容易为公民所获得。更具体地说，本研究研究的风险分担和社交网络在感知和减轻当地环境风险的作用。研究团队重点关注两个方面：增加风险缓解合作和增加风险缓解技术的私人投资。本项目所处的环境是，由于缺乏政府提供的减少环境风险的资源，这两个因素变得特别重要。研究首先测试非正式保险，其中遵守可能主要是由现有的社会结构和互惠规范，可以有效地应对当地公共产品的供应不足。然后，该团队研究了社交网络如何帮助增加合作，采用和投资风险缓解技术。为了了解这些渠道，本项目探讨了有关风险的信息如何能够促进更多的合作和减轻风险。这种成本相对较低的方法与孟加拉国政府目前的方法不同，孟加拉国政府目前的方法侧重于有限的昂贵基础设施。该研究是在孟加拉国农村进行的随机对照试验，研究人员随机分配干预措施：（a）事前风险分担，（B）风险信息提供，（c）中深度威尔斯井产出低砷的示范。原始数据使研究小组能够测试这些干预措施在缓解工作和减少人口砷暴露方面的有效性。实验设计允许记录干预措施的因果影响。该研究团队打算与政策制定者和组织分享结果，以便在此学到的经验教训可以应用于类似的设置。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为值得通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估的支持。

For thousands of communities in the United States the environment, natural or contaminated, presents challenges to human health. These risks are often highly localized and therefore avoidable. Many Americans depend on well water that often is below the standards set by regulatory actions pursuant to the Safe Drinking Water Act. One approach to reduce contaminants is to rely on the government to mitigate these risks and reduce the welfare impact of adverse outcomes through the provision of local public goods, including safe drinking water and health services. Government provision of such public goods, however, is not always adequate. The assumptions underlying this project is that such limitations may be overcome by (a) exploiting private risk to achieve greater cooperation, building upon the "veil of ignorance" concept of John Rawls to foster cooperation for public goods; (b) departing from the pitfalls of either extreme of public or private goods only by focusing on sharing of privately-owned resources; and (c) exploring how information and social-networks increase cooperation as well as encouraging private investments in mitigation technologies. To test these concepts, the researchers have chosen as context a major disaster of natural origin: toxic levels of arsenic in groundwater pumped by millions of private wells across Bangladesh. Information on individual risk, in this case well tests for arsenic, are provided in ways that encourage greater cooperation and investment through the sharing of safe wells and the installation of new safe wells. The findings have implications for environmental policy in the United States as high-resolution data on water, air, and soil quality become increasingly accessible to citizens. More specifically, this research studies the role of risk-sharing and social networks in perception and mitigation of local environmental risks. The research team focuses on two aspects: increasing cooperation for risk mitigation and increasing private investment in risk mitigation technology. This project is based in a setting where these two factors become particularly important due to a lack of government-provided resources for reducing environmental risk. The research first tests whether informal insurance, where compliance may be primarily enforced by existing social structure and reciprocity norms, can effectively counter the undersupply of local public goods. Then, the team studies how social-networks can help in increasing cooperation, adoption and investment in risk mitigation technology. To understand the channels, this project explores how information on risk can facilitate more cooperation and risk mitigation. This relatively low-cost approach is different from the current approach of the government of Bangladesh which is focused on expensive infrastructure of limited reach. The study is a randomized controlled trial in rural Bangladesh, where the researchers randomly assign interventions on (a) ex-ante risk sharing, (b) information provision on risk, and (c) the demonstration of intermediate-depth wells which yield low arsenic. The original data allow the research team to test the effectiveness of these interventions in terms of mitigation efforts and reduction in arsenic exposure to the population. The experimental design allows for documentation of the causal impact of the interventions. The research team intends to share the results with policy makers and organizations so that lessons learnt here can be applied in similar settings.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.