How Do Risk Perceptions Respond to Information? The Case of Radon

V. Smith and F Reed Johnson

The Review of Economics and Statistics, 1988, vol. 70, issue 1, 1-8

Abstract: A specialized survey of Maine households' responses to information about the risks associate d with radon concentrations in their homes and water supplies was use d to evaluate how they form risk perceptions. The findings support a modified form of a Bayesian learning model to describe how individual s used the information to revise their risk perceptions. Moreover, in dividuals who took some mitigating actions reported lower risk percep tions after that action. The overall results are potentially importan t to the use of information programs as policy instruments for risk r eduction because they indicate that new information can affect risk p erceptions in a systematic way. Copyright 1988 by MIT Press.

Date: 1988
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (74)

Downloads: (external link)
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0034-6535%2819880 ... O%3B2-N&origin=repec full text (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to JSTOR subscribers. See http://www.jstor.org for details.

Related works:
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:tpr:restat:v:70:y:1988:i:1:p:1-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=0034-6535

Access Statistics for this article

The Review of Economics and Statistics is currently edited by Pierre Azoulay, Olivier Coibion, Will Dobbie, Raymond Fisman, Benjamin R. Handel, Brian A. Jacob, Kareen Rozen, Xiaoxia Shi, Tavneet Suri and Yi Xu

More articles in The Review of Economics and Statistics from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().