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

总的来说，旨在改善人类健康、安全和环境的联邦法规避免了成千上万人的死亡，减少了数十万例非致命伤害，但也造成了每年高达数十亿美元的成本。为了具有法律约束力，几乎所有高成本法规都必须通过“成本效益测试”：规则避免的危害的货币化价值超过被监管行业和消费者的成本。成本效益分析（CBA）在将拯救生命的好处用货币换算，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却很少受到关注。本项目假定对当前收益和成本评估方法的两项更改可能会改变哪些法规通过或未通过成本-收益测试，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所有利他主义的考虑，使用减少自己死亡的小风险的估计私人价值来评估有益于整个国家的公共项目。其次，CBA含蓄地规定，一个项目的总收益与拯救的生命数量成正比，而不管一些人是否面临更高的死亡风险；CBA也只考虑监管的总成本，即使成本对一些企业或消费者的影响不成比例。两个大型调查实验探究了这些简化的假设，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监管的感知可取性来估计“具有共同目标的统计生命的价值”。在假设监管中，权衡的规模是强加给每个人的数十亿美元和随机拯救的数千条生命，而不是在几美元和一小部分生命之间进行个人权衡。这项调查还测试（并隔离）了：(1)“家长式”利他主义（关心他人的长寿，即使其他人愿意以更少的监管成本承担更大的风险）与“非家长式”利他主义（考虑他人的净利益，包括他们的成本）的影响；(2)将权衡作为固定数量的可接受成本和固定监管成本的用户定义的最小生命挽救数。第二项调查测试了一个假设，即个人的风险和成本水平可以在不分解的情况下对整个人口进行总结（即，个人认为任何水平的风险或成本的福利影响都是线性的），使用受试者对他们认为不同假设的个人伤害概率和不同个人成本的可怕程度的评级。这个实验揭示了是否存在可以合理地四舍五入到零的风险或成本的最低水平，以及/或其影响不仅仅与较低水平成比例的难以容忍的高水平。该项目还招募了联邦政府中CBA的从业人员和用户作为两个调查的单独主题组，并最终为这些官员举办了两次研讨会，讨论研究结果，以及增加“共同目标”和风险和成本的非线性评估是否可能改变重要的先前决定，即哪种监管选择实际上对社会具有最大的净效益。

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.