Accounting for heterogeneity in behavioural responses to health-risk information treatments

Ash Morgan (), John Whitehead and William L. Huth

Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy, 2016, vol. 5, issue 3, 283-297

Abstract: Traditional revealed and stated preference models consider a typical individual's behavioural responses to various policy-based information treatments. For some cost–benefit applications in which resource managers are concerned with responses from a representative individual, this is sufficient. However, as behavioural responses to information treatments can vary across respondents, we develop a latent class analysis with covariates to examine unobserved heterogeneity responses to health-risk information treatments. Results from a probabilistic model indicate that classes of consumers respond differently to the health-risk information treatments. Principally, we find that the media form of the information treatment is important, with raw consumer groups typically more responsive to a brochure information treatment, while cooked oyster consumers are more responsive to the same information in a video format. We also find that a proposed US Food and Drug Administration policy on processing all raw oysters before market has a greater effect on reducing demand for consumers of cooked oysters. However, with an associated price premium, all consumer classes reduce demand. Overall, the results suggest that future policy-based research could benefit from examining potential heterogeneity in individuals’ responses to risk information treatments in order to fully understand the efficacy of treatments on behaviour.

Date: 2016
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/21606544.2015.1115747 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Accounting for Heterogeneity in Behavioral Responses to Health-Risk Information Treatments (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:teepxx:v:5:y:2016:i:3:p:283-297

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/teep20

DOI: 10.1080/21606544.2015.1115747

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy is currently edited by Ken Willis

More articles in Journal of Environmental Economics and Policy from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().