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

评估环境、公共健康和安全法规的净效益

• 批准号: 1629287
• 负责人: Branden Johnson
• 金额: $ 58.13万
• 依托单位: Decision Science Research Institute
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Continuing Grant
• 财政年份: 2017
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2017-04-15 至 2021-03-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1629287&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Estimating; Net; Benefits; Environmental; Public

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.

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数千人死亡，并减少了数十万起非致命伤害，但每年也造成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受监管行业和消费者的成本。成本效益分析（CBA）在挽救生命的效益的货币转换以及如何用不完整的数据估计风险方面一直存在争议，但讽刺的是，如何量化风险降低和成本对人类福利的影响的机制却较少受到关注。注意力。该项目假设对当前效益和成本评估方法的两项改变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水平。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，利用减少个人死亡风险的估计私人价值来评估造福整个国家的公共项目。其次，CBA 隐含地规定，一项计划的总效益与挽救的生命数量成正比，无论某些人是否面临更高的死亡风险，并且 CBA 也只考虑该法规的总成本，即使成本影响到某些企业或消费者两项大型调查实验探讨了这些简化的假设，并提供了有原则的、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感知可取性来估计“具有共同目标的统计生活的价值”，其中权衡的规模是强加给每个人的数十亿美元和成千上万随机拯救的生命，而不是个人之间的权衡几美元和一个人生命的一小部分。这项调查还测试（并隔离）了以下因素的影响：（1）“家长式”利他主义（关心他人的长寿，即使其他人宁愿以更少的监管成本承担更大的风险）与“非家长式”利他主义（考虑他人的利益）净收益（包括成本）； (2) 权衡为用户定义的拯救固定数量生命的可接受成本和用户定义的固定监管成本拯救生命的最小数量。 第二项调查测试了这样的假设：个人的风险和成本水平可以在不分类的情况下对总体进行求和（即，个人将任何水平的风险或成本的福利影响视为线性），使用受试者对风险或成本的可怕程度的评级查看不同的假设的个人伤害概率和不同的个人成本。该实验揭示了风险或成本是否存在可以明智地舍入为零的最低水平，和/或难以忍受的高水平，其影响不仅仅与较低水平的影响成正比。该项目还招募了联邦政府中 CBA 的从业者和用户作为这两项调查的单独主题组，并最终举办了两次研讨会，让这些官员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了之前关于哪种监管选择实际上对社会具有最大净效益的重要决策。