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

对于美国数以千计的社区来说，环境，无论是自然的还是受污染的，都对人类健康构成了挑战。这些风险往往是高度本地化的，因此是可以避免的。许多美国人依赖井水，而井水往往低于根据《安全饮用水法》采取的监管行动设定的标准。减少污染物的一种方法是依靠政府减轻这些风险，并通过提供包括安全饮用水和医疗服务在内的当地公共产品来减少不利后果对福利的影响。然而，政府提供的此类公共产品并不总是充足的。该项目所依据的假设是，可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，并以约翰·罗尔斯的“无知面纱”概念为基础促进公共产品的合作；(B)只有通过共享私人所有的资源，才能摆脱公共产品或私人产品的极端风险；(C)探讨信息和社交网络如何加强合作以及鼓励对缓解技术的私人投资。为了测试这些概念，研究人员选择了一场源于自然的重大灾难作为背景：孟加拉国各地数百万口私人水井抽水的地下水中砷的有毒水平。通过分享安全井和安装新的安全井，以鼓励更多合作和投资的方式提供关于个人风险的信息，在这种情况下是关于砷的油井测试。随着关于水、空气和土壤质量的高分辨率数据越来越多地为公民所用，这些发现对美国的环境政策产生了影响。更具体地说，这项研究研究了风险分担和社会网络在感知和缓解当地环境风险方面的作用。研究小组重点关注两个方面：增加风险缓解合作和增加私人对风险缓解技术的投资。这个项目的背景是，由于缺乏政府提供的资源来减少环境风险，这两个因素变得特别重要。这项研究首先测试了非正式保险能否有效地应对当地公共产品供应不足的问题。在非正式保险中，合规可能主要通过现有的社会结构和互惠规范来强制执行。然后，该团队研究了社交网络如何帮助增加风险缓解技术的合作、采用和投资。为了了解这些渠道，该项目探索了有关风险的信息如何能够促进更多的合作和风险缓解。这种成本相对较低的做法与孟加拉国政府目前的做法不同，孟加拉国政府目前的做法侧重于有限覆盖范围内的昂贵基础设施。这项研究是在孟加拉国农村地区进行的一项随机对照试验，研究人员随机分配干预措施，内容包括(A)事前风险分担，(B)风险信息提供，(C)低砷中深井示范。原始数据使研究小组能够测试这些干预措施在缓解努力和减少人群接触砷方面的有效性。实验设计允许记录干预措施的因果影响。研究团队打算与政策制定者和组织分享结果，以便在类似的环境中应用这里学到的经验教训。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.