Surviving the Titantic Disaster: Economic, Natural and Social Determinants

Bruno Frey, David Savage and Benno Torgler

Berkeley Program in Law and Economics, Working Paper Series from Berkeley Program in Law and Economics

Abstract: The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better chance of survival than those in second and third class. British passengers were more likely to perish than members of other nations. This extreme event represents a rare case of a well-documented life and death situation where social norms were enforced. This paper shows that economic analysis can account for human behavior in such situations.

Keywords: Decision under Pressure; Tragic Events and Disasters; Survival; Quasi-Natural Experiment; Altruism (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2009-02-01
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (8)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.escholarship.org/uc/item/6h24b1vt.pdf;origin=repeccitec (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Surviving the Titanic Disaster: Economic, Natural and Social Determinants (2009)
Working Paper: Surviving the Titanic Disaster: Economic, Natural and Social Determinants (2009)
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:cdl:oplwec:qt6h24b1vt

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Berkeley Program in Law and Economics, Working Paper Series from Berkeley Program in Law and Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by eScholarship, California Digital Library ().