A Face-Validity Test of Response Strategies to ‘Dread Risks'

This paper reports the results of the follow-up, face-validity test on a protocol developed to explore the impact of context and baseline risk on peoples? marginal rates of substitution between wealth and risk of death across a range of contexts using a modified risk-risk trade-off methodology. Analysis of these qualitative interviews revealed that context had different effects for different people. For some people it had almost no effect in that such respondents focussed mainly on the baseline risks they faced, whilst for others it had a marked affect on their risk-risk tradeoff. Most notably, only a minority of respondents described a behavioural strategy that could be construed as EU maximising. This has wider and extremely profound implications for the use of risk-risk trade-off measures and WTP-derived Value of Prevented Fatalities in costbenefit analysis.