Keeping up with the Joneses: Examining relative concerns in health related domains

People care about relative position and are willing to engage resources to be above others or at least not below them. Nevertheless, the scarce existing evidence suggests that health is a less positional good: people prefer to be healthy even if others are healthier than them. Unlike previous literature, we use a survey-based study to explore the positionality of several health-related dimensions (e.g., health care reimbursement, cosmetic surgery) in a Choice versus Happiness condition. We find that agents exhibit mainly egalitarian preferences, namely they take into account others' situations but prefer everybody to receive the same amount of health attributes. Moreover, when health attributes are related to physical appearance, agents express significantly higher levels of positional preferences. We draw several policy implications from these egalitarian preferences.

Deliberative Risk Ranking to Inform Homeland Security Strategic Planning

Reliably managing homeland security risks requires an understanding of which risks are more concerning than others. This paper applies a validated risk ranking methodology, the Deliberative Method for Ranking Risks, to the homeland security domain. This method provides a structured approach to elicit risk rankings from participants based on deliberative consideration of science-based risk assessments. Steps in this effort include first identifying the set of attributes that must be covered when describing terrorism and disaster hazards in a comprehensive manner, then developing concise summaries of existing knowledge of a broad set of homeland security hazards. Using these materials, the study elicits relative concerns about the hazards that are being considered. The relative concerns about hazards provide a starting point for prioritizing solutions for reducing risks to homeland security. The consistency and agreement of the rankings, as well as the individual satisfaction with the process and results, suggest that the Deliberative Method for Ranking Risks can be appropriately applied in the homeland security domain. The rankings themselves reflected greater concern over natural disasters than terrorist events. This research suggests that deliberative risk ranking methods could provide a valid and reliable description of individuals’ concerns about homeland security risks to inform strategic planning.