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

个人、公司、消费者、公民的许多决定， 集团、政府、监管机构和法院都涉及交易 在潜在的不幸或灾难发生之前， 通过保险，风险规避行为，或赔偿 风险承担--或在风险发生后--通过私人或政府 赔偿 这些决定往往看起来不一致， 不公平或不合理的。 保险公司，未来不确定 奖励，拒绝提供针对某些风险的政策， 他们的决定都是基于最坏的情况 个人 对风险的反应不一致，对待小风险就像 他们是不存在的（不系安全带或采取 预防艾滋病）或如此之大，以压倒所有其他 反对基因重组（genetic recombination）。 政府对这些问题的回应往往是广告- 如德莱尼修正案，导致了意想不到的 矛盾的结果。 这种跨学科的合作 一项研究计划调查了这些令人困惑的行为特征， 在多学科的偏见研究传统中， 决策中的谬误。 它调查了 这些偏见是否扭曲了机构的运作， 市场和社会资源配置。 这项研究将 开发和评估几种旨在纠正 决策偏差或保护个人免受其影响， 包括教育，呈现信息的新方式， 将激励和监管相结合的混合战略， 保险和赔偿。 该研究计划将偏见分为四类： 参考点效应，其中对结果的偏好取决于 与之比较的是;偶然加权， 选择取决于表达决定的方式; 决策规则，其中绝对优先权被赋予一个 属性（例如，节省资金，避免灾难性 和阈值效应，其中小风险或 成本（例如一支香烟的风险或低成本的额外成本） 保险公司（即使他们被完全忽视， 重复 这项研究将检查这种偏见是否会影响 关于提供或购买保险的决定， 保险费，补偿不幸的受害者，补偿人们 对于不幸的风险事先，并从事保护 行为 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。 的 结果将影响心理学内部的理论争议， 经济学和决策理论关于偏见的相关性 真实的的决策，关于市场是否 竞争减少了偏见的影响，关于 偏见的本质

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.