Are distributional preferences for safety stable? A longitudinal analysis before and after the COVID-19 outbreak

Danae Arroyos Calvera*, Judith Covey, Rebecca McDonald

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

Abstract

Policy makers aim to respect public preferences when making trade-offs between policies, yet most estimates of the value of safety neglect individuals’ preferences over how safety is distributed. Incorporating these preferences into policy first requires measuring them. Arroyos-Calvera et al. (2019) documented that people cared most about efficiency, but that equity followed closely, and self-interest mattered too, but not enough to override preferences for efficiency and equity. Early 2020 saw the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This event would impose major changes in how people perceived and experienced risk to life, creating an opportunity to test whether safety-related preferences are stable and robust to important contextual changes. Further developing Arroyos-Calvera et al.’s methodology and re-inviting an international general population sample of participants that had taken part in pre-pandemic online surveys in 2017 and 2018, we collected an April 2020 wave of the survey and showed that overall preferences for efficiency, equity and self-interest were remarkably stable before and after the pandemic outbreak. We hope this offers policy makers reassurance that once these preferences have been elicited from a representative sample of the population, they need not be re-estimated after important contextual changes.
Original languageEnglish
Article number115855
Number of pages9
JournalSocial Science and Medicine
Volume324
Early online date23 Mar 2023
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - May 2023

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
We are grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for their financial support (Grant Number RP2012-V-022 ). We would like to thank Graham Loomes for his involvement in the early stages of this project, and to participants of the 2022 Behavioural Public Policy conference, 2021 Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis (SBCA) conferences, and 2019 European SBCA conference for valuable comments. We would also like to give credit to Michael Jones-Lee, who we wish we had more time with to advance this line of work.

Publisher Copyright:
© 2023

Keywords

  • efficiency
  • equity
  • self-interest
  • risk
  • preference stability

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Health(social science)
  • History and Philosophy of Science

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