Updating Subjective Risks in the Presence of Conflicting Information: An Application to Climate Change

Trudy Ann Cameron ()

University of Oregon Economics Department Working Papers from University of Oregon Economics Department

Abstract: Willingness to support public programs for risk management often depends on individual subjective risk perceptions in the face of uncertain science. As part of a larger study concerning climate change, we explore individual updated subjective risks as a function of individual priors, the nature of external information, and individual attributes. We examine several rival hypotheses about how subjective risks change in the face of new information (Bayesian updating, alarmist learning, and ambiguity aversion). The source and nature of external information, as well as its collective ambiguity, can have varying effects across the population, in terms of both expectations and uncertainty.

Keywords: risk elicitation; subjective probability; prior/ posterior distributions; ambiguity aversion; Bayesian updating; alarmist learning (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D8 N5 Q2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2001-07-14
View list of references View citations in EconPapers

Downloads: (external link)
http://economics.uor ... Subjective_Risks.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Updating Subjective Risks in the Presence of Conflicting Information: An Application to Climate Change (2005)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in University of Oregon Economics Department Working Papers from University of Oregon Economics Department
Contact information at EDIRC.
Series data maintained by Bill Harbaugh ().