环境风险知觉和评价的整体框架

环境风险通常发生在一定时间之后,以某种可能性发生在某个特定的地方,使得某些人群受到影响。因此,环境风险是典型的多维度事件,它涵盖四个基本的偏好维度：时间、空间、概率与社会性,每个维度都可能导致环境风险知觉和评价出现折扣（discount）现象。但是,传统视角往往关注单一维度,主要是时间,因而割裂了维度的整体性。基于环境风险的多维度特征,提出了一个统一的多维度偏好框架,为环境风险知觉及评价提供整体性视角。这四个偏好维度统一的内在原因是心理距离。维度共性意味着时间维度上的折现机制能够应用到其它维度,为此,对环境风险跨期评价中关于折现率热点问题的研究进展进行了一个关键的梳理。未来有必要在此整体框架下,重点关注三个方面的问题：（1）环境折现率,对环境折现率的要素及其关系进行规范性分析,进而分析环境贴现率与经济贴现率之间的关系,及双率折现对可持续发展的涵义;（2）基于维度共性,将时间维度上的研究结论应用到其它维度;（3）研究多重维度复合情形下的偏好和评价问题,建立综合性描述模型,依托具体案例探讨有效的环境风险沟通策略、环境政策和制度设计。     

Minimax regret discounting

The paper considers an environmental policy decision in which the appropriate approach for discounting future costs and benefits is unknown. Uncertainty about the discount rate is formulated as a decision under Knightian uncertainty. To solve this, we employ minimax regret, a decision criterion that is much less conservative then the related criterion maximin—in particular, it can be shown to implement a “proportional response” in that it equally balances concern about the mistake of doing too little with that of doing too much. Despite the criterion's balanced nature, the minimax regret solution mimics a policy that maximizes the present discounted value of future net benefits with an effective (certainty-equivalent) discount rate that declines over time to the lowest possible rate. In addition to reinforcing Weitzman's (1998) original limiting result, the approach generates concrete policy advice when decision makers are unable to specify a prior over possible discount rates. We apply it to the Stern–Nordhaus discounting debate and find that the effective discount rate converges to the Stern rate in just under 200 years.     

Minimax regret discounting

The paper considers an environmental policy decision in which the appropriate approach for discounting future costs and benefits is unknown. Uncertainty about the discount rate is formulated as a decision under Knightian uncertainty. To solve this, we employ minimax regret, a decision criterion that is much less conservative then the related criterion maximin—in particular, it can be shown to implement a “proportional response” in that it equally balances concern about the mistake of doing too little with that of doing too much. Despite the criterion's balanced nature, the minimax regret solution mimics a policy that maximizes the present discounted value of future net benefits with an effective (certainty-equivalent) discount rate that declines over time to the lowest possible rate. In addition to reinforcing Weitzman's (1998) original limiting result, the approach generates concrete policy advice when decision makers are unable to specify a prior over possible discount rates. We apply it to the Stern–Nordhaus discounting debate and find that the effective discount rate converges to the Stern rate in just under 200 years.     

The endowment effect,discounting and the environment

There is a considerable body of evidence showing that our preferences exhibit both reference dependence and loss aversion, a.k.a. the endowment effect. In this paper, we consider the implications of the endowment effect for discounting, with a special focus on discounting future improvements in the environment. We show that the endowment effect modifies the discount rate via (i) an instantaneous endowment effect and (ii) a reference-updating effect. Moreover we show that these two effects often combine to dampen the preference to smooth consumption over time. What this implies for discounting future environmental benefits may then depend critically on whether environmental quality is merely a factor of production of material consumption, or whether it is an amenity. On an increasing path of material consumption, dampened consumption smoothing implies a lower discount rate. But on a declining path of environmental quality and where we derive utility directly from environmental quality, it implies a higher discount rate. On non-monotonic paths, loss aversion specifically can give rise to substantial discontinuities in the discount rate.     

Valuation of cancer and microbial disease risk reductions in municipal drinking water: An analysis of risk context using multiple valuation methods

We examine the value of health risk reductions (microbial illnesses/deaths and bladder cancer illnesses/deaths) in the context of drinking water quality treatment by public systems. When we assume that combined mortality and morbidity risk reductions are equally spread in the future; our results suggest that microbial risk-reduction programs have higher value than cancer risk-reduction programs, but that mortality risk reduction values are not significantly different for cancer and microbials. However, when a 25-year cancer latency is accounted for and a 5% discount rate is used, the value of cancer mortality risk reductions exceeds the value for microbial risk reductions. We also address a number of methodological issues, including performance of alternative choice experiment estimation (CE) techniques, relationship of CE to contingent valuation results, and implications for incorporating morbidity and mortality endpoints in the same survey instrument.     

A note on environmental risk and the rate of discount

This paper examines the use of risk-adjusted discount rates to evaluate future environmental risks. It is determined that the risk-adjusted discount rate should be lower—not higher—than the risk-free rate if evaluation of future environmental risks is to point toward optimality.     

Discounting and relative consumption

We analyze optimal social discount rates when people derive utility from relative consumption, i.e. their own consumption level relative to the consumption level of others. We compare the social, private, and conventional Ramsey rates. Assuming a positive growth rate, we find that (1) the social discount rate exceeds the private discount rate if the importance of relative consumption increases with consumption, and that (2) the social discount rate is lower than the Ramsey rate given quasi-concavity in own and others’ consumption and risk aversion with respect to others’ consumption. Numerical calculations demonstrate that the latter difference may be substantial and have important implications for long run environmental issues such as global warming.     

Time perspective and climate change policy

The tendency to foreshorten time units as we peer further into the future provides an explanation for hyperbolic discounting at an inter-generational time scale. We study implications of hyperbolic discounting for climate change policy, when the probability of a climate-induced catastrophe depends on the stock of greenhouse gasses. We characterize the set of Markov perfect equilibria (MPE) of the inter-generational game amongst a succession of policymakers. Each policymaker reflects her generation's preferences, including its hyperbolic discounting. For a binary action game, we compare the MPE set to a “restricted commitment” benchmark. We compare the associated “constant-equivalent discount rates” and the willingness to pay to control climate change with assumptions and recommendations in the Stern Review on Climate Change.“…My picture of the world is drawn in perspective…. I apply my perspective not merely to space but also to time”—Ramsey.     

Discounting under uncertainty: Disentangling the Weitzman and the Gollier effect

The uncertainty of future economic development affects the term structure of discount rates and, thus, the intertemporal weights that are to be used in cost benefit analysis. The U.K. and France have recently adopted a falling term structure to incorporate uncertainty and the U.S. is considering a similar step. A series of publications discusses the following concern: a seemingly analogous argument used to justify falling discount rates can also justify increasing discount rates. We show that increasing and decreasing discount rates mean different things, can coexist, are created by different channels through which risk affects evaluation, and have the same qualitative effect of making long-term payoffs more attractive.     

Valuation of natural capital under uncertain substitutability

Natural capital is complex to value notably because of the high uncertainties surrounding the substitutability of its future ecosystem services. We examine a Lucas economy in which a consumption good is produced by combining different inputs, one of them being an ecosystem service that is partially substitutable with other inputs. The growth rate of these inputs and the elasticity of substitution evolve in a stochastic way. We characterize the socially efficient ecological discount rates that should be used to value future ecosystem services at different time horizons. We show that the inverse of the elasticity of substitution can be interpreted as the CCAPM beta of natural capital. We also show that any increase in risk of this beta reduces the ecological discount rate. If our collective beliefs about the elasticity of substitution of ecosystem services are Gaussian, the ecological discount rates go to minus infinity for finite maturities. In that case, a marginal increase in natural capital has an infinite value. We provide a realistic calibration of the model that is coherent with observed asset prices by using the model of extreme events of Barro (2006). The bliss maturity for infinite discount factors is less than 100 years in this calibration.     

Discounting for personal and social payments: Patience for others,impatience for ourselves

The market rate of return on private investment is often used as the discount rate when conducting cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of public projects. I argue that the decision to invest pits current consumption against future consumption, both of which accumulate to the private decision maker. Public projects, on the other hand, provide benefits that accrue to society in general. To examine the appropriateness of discount rates based on returns to private investment, this paper considers lab experiments designed to test whether individuals discount personal and social benefits at different rates. Personal benefits are captured through personal monetary payments, while social benefits are captured through anonymous donations to charitable organizations. I jointly elicit time and risk preferences and find that subjects discount charitable contributions at significantly lower rates than personal payments.     

Intertemporal and intergenerational pareto efficiency: A comment

In a recent issue of this Journal, Sandler and Smith developed an analysis from which they concluded that discounting is Pareto inefficient in an intertemporal context. This comment questions the validity of that conclusion and demonstrates the essential role played by the discount rate in achieving intertemporal Pareto efficiency within a market economy.     

Discounting for personal and social payments: Patience for others,impatience for ourselves

The market rate of return on private investment is often used as the discount rate when conducting cost-benefit analysis (CBA) of public projects. I argue that the decision to invest pits current consumption against future consumption, both of which accumulate to the private decision maker. Public projects, on the other hand, provide benefits that accrue to society in general. To examine the appropriateness of discount rates based on returns to private investment, this paper considers lab experiments designed to test whether individuals discount personal and social benefits at different rates. Personal benefits are captured through personal monetary payments, while social benefits are captured through anonymous donations to charitable organizations. I jointly elicit time and risk preferences and find that subjects discount charitable contributions at significantly lower rates than personal payments.     

Valuation of human health: An integrated model of willingness to pay for mortality and morbidity risk reductions

This paper develops and applies an integrated model of mortality and morbidity valuation that is consistent with the principles of welfare economics. To obtain the integrated model, the standard one-period expected utility model of one person facing the prospect of either being alive or dead is extended to incorporate (1) a third health state (sick) with a utility level that is intermediate to utility if healthy and utility if dead, (2) a family perspective in which a parent makes choices about risk exposure both for herself and for a child, and (3) a multi-period framework that allows for possible parent/child differences in illness latency. Monetary benefits of health risk reduction obtained from the integrated model are compared with those that would be computed using the standard model. The integrated model then is applied using data obtained from two field studies of skin cancer and leukemia to demonstrate how it can be used to estimate health benefits of reduced illness and death risks.     

Discounting in the presence of scarce ecosystem services

The discount rate for cost-benefit analysis has to take account of future scarcity of ecosystem services in consumption and production. Previous literature focuses on the first aspect and shows the importance of the relative price effect, for given growth rates of consumption and ecosystem services. This paper focuses on intermediate ecosystem services in production and shows that for limited substitutability and a low growth rate of these ecosystem services, the growth rate of consumption, and thus the discount rate, declines towards a low value. Using a Ramsey growth model, the paper distinguishes three cases. If ecosystem services can be easily substituted, the discount rate converges to the usual value in the long term. Secondly, if ecosystem services can be easily substituted in production but not in consumption, the relative price effect is important. Finally, and most interestingly, if ecosystem services cannot be easily substituted in production, the discount rate declines towards a low value and the relative price effect is less important. Another part of the previous literature has shown that a declining discount rate is the result of introducing several forms of uncertainty, but this paper reaches that conclusion from an endogenous effect on the growth rate of the economy.     

A multi-event model to study stage-dependent dispersal in radio-collared hares: when hunting promotes costly transience

Behavioral ecologists have often assumed that dispersal is costly mainly because of unfamiliarity with traversed habitats during dispersal and energy costs of the movement per se; thus, dispersers that have successfully settled should experience survival rates comparable to those of philopatric individuals. In this paper, we tested that hypothesis using 152 radio-collared European hares in a harvested population. We developed a multi-event capture recapture model, combining telemetry data and recoveries and separately modeling the foray probability, the settlement probability, and the permanent dispersal probability. The parameterization introduced here raises the possibility of separately testing effects on survival and dispersal probabilities at each stage of dispersal (departure, transience, and settlement). In accordance with our expectations, we reveal that dispersers incur higher mortality risks during transience and the early settlement period than philopatric individuals or settled dispersers. We also found that dispersers suffer from higher risks of being shot. Those results illustrate that unfamiliarity with the habitat during transience makes dispersal costly and that settled dispersers may enjoy survival rates comparable to those of philopatric individuals. Surprisingly, we also found that individuals have a higher probability of foraying during the hunting season. We suggest that hunting and related disturbances increase dispersal costs both by increasing mortality risk during transience and (perhaps) by increasing movement rates. We emphasize the need to take human pressures into account as factors that may drive the demographics of movements in populations.     

An anatomy of a groundwater contamination episode

Using the contamination episode at Price Landfill, New Jersey, as a case study, major analytical and informational issues characterizing groundwater pollution, with special emphasis on uncertainty associated with the environmental medium, especially solute-transport processes, and the valuation of health risks, principally dose-response relationships, are addressed. Alternative approaches to modeling the physical-chemical processes are described and subsequently coupled with mortality risk predictions to derive estimates of expected pollution costs: reduced longevity (pollution damage costs) and cost of control and remedial measures (damage reduction costs).     

Accounting for rate instability and spatial patterns in the boundary analysis of cancer mortality maps

Boundary analysis of cancer maps may highlight areas where causative exposures change through geographic space, the presence of local populations with distinct cancer incidences, or the impact of different cancer control methods. Too often, such analysis ignores the spatial pattern of incidence or mortality rates and overlooks the fact that rates computed from sparsely populated geographic entities can be very unreliable. This paper proposes a new methodology that accounts for the uncertainty and spatial correlation of rate data in the detection of significant edges between adjacent entities or polygons. Poisson kriging is first used to estimate the risk value and the associated standard error within each polygon, accounting for the population size and the risk semivariogram computed from raw rates. The boundary statistic is then defined as half the absolute difference between kriged risks. Its reference distribution, under the null hypothesis of no boundary, is derived through the generation of multiple realizations of the spatial distribution of cancer risk values. This paper presents three types of neutral models generated using methods of increasing complexity: the common random shuffle of estimated risk values, a spatial re-ordering of these risks, or p-field simulation that accounts for the population size within each polygon. The approach is illustrated using age-adjusted pancreatic cancer mortality rates for white females in 295 US counties of the Northeast (1970–1994). Simulation studies demonstrate that Poisson kriging yields more accurate estimates of the cancer risk and how its value changes between polygons (i.e., boundary statistic), relatively to the use of raw rates or local empirical Bayes smoother. When used in conjunction with spatial neutral models generated by p-field simulation, the boundary analysis based on Poisson kriging estimates minimizes the proportion of type I errors (i.e., edges wrongly declared significant) while the frequency of these errors is predicted well by the p-value of the statistical test.

2种毒性评估方法对PAHs污染场地人体健康风险的比较研究

毒性评估是人体健康风险评价的重要部分,目前主要存在2种方法,一种基于PAHs相对于苯并[a]芘(BaP)的毒性当量因子,采用Ba P致癌斜率因子参数(方法 1),另一种直接采用各PAHs致癌斜率因子和非致癌参考剂量等参数(方法 2)。然而2种毒性评估方法得到的风险及修复量是否存在差异以及引起差异的原因等问题鲜有讨论。针对苏南某焦化厂PAHs污染土壤,采用分层土壤健康风险评价模型,对比了2种毒性评估方法确定的PAHs风险、修复目标污染物及土方量的差异,并对引起差异的关键因素进行探讨。结果表明:对于0.0~1.0 m表层土壤,方法 1和方法 2确定的致癌风险最大值分别1.48E-05和1.32E-05,均超过可接受致癌风险,修复土方量分别为27 846 m~3和28 667 m3,修复目标污染物均为Ba P和二苊烃(Acy)。对于1.0~3.0 m深层土壤,方法 1确定的致癌风险最大值为3.36E-08,低于可接受致癌风险,不需要修复;而方法 2确定的致癌风险最大值为3.73E-04,非致癌危害指数最大值为6.96E+01,分别超过可接受致癌风险和非致癌危害商,需要修复,修复目标污染物为萘(NaP),修复土方量为35 944 m~3。最终,方法 2确定的总修复土方量(64 611 m~3)为方法 1确定土方量(27 846 m~3)的2.45倍,而这种差异主要是由于方法 1低估了深层土壤中高挥发性PAH单体尤其是NaP的风险所致。因此,从保守角度建议采用方法 2进行PAHs风险评价。     

Uncertainty and measurement error in welfare models for risk changes

Most welfare models of environmental or mortality risk reductions assume that risks are exogenously determined and known with certainty. However, a growing body of research suggests that uncertainty about risks can affect choices over risky prospects. I present a decision-weighted random-utility model that decomposes welfare losses into those attributable to an increase in the deterministic component of risk and those attributable to uncertainty about risk. I apply the model to an illustrative dataset of subjects' perceived mortality risk and willingness to accept the risk of nuclear-waste transport. I estimate the model using Lewbel's (2000) strictly exogenous regressor approach to account for endogeneity bias and measurement error. Subjects display aversion to both risk and uncertainty about the risk of a transport accident, so that increases in either leads to social-welfare losses. Roughly 12% of the external cost of nuclear-waste transport is attributable to the public's uncertainty about transport risk.