Browsing by Author "Keisner, Deborah Kerley"
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Item Measuring Stigma: The Behavioral Implications of Disgust(Department of Applied Economics and Statistics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE., 2015-05) Kecinski, Maik; Keisner, Deborah Kerley; Messer, Kent D.; Schulze, William D.Our experiments provide insight into the behavioral responses of disgust from an economic perspective. Stigmatization of products and technologies can lead to large monetary losses even when there are no associative risks. We use a dead sterilized cockroach to ‘contaminate’ drinking water and generate willingness-to-pay and willingness-to-accept measures of participants’ reactions. Contrary to previous results, not involving economic incentives, we find that (1) most participants’ values remain unchanged for cockroach water, (2) of those that do display a strong reaction, this stigma response is not always permanent, (3) stigma can be mitigated through treatment such as water filtration. (JEL C91, D81)Item Military Readiness and Environmental Protection Through Cost.effective Land Conservation(2015-05) Kecinski, Maik; Keisner, Deborah Kerley; Messer, Kent D.; Schulze, William D.Harboring a high density of threatened and endangered species on its bases leaves the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) with a critical responsibility establishing sound environmental policies while also continuing training and ensuring military readiness. This dual objective is the goal of the Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration program, a large conservation fund for military installations that is mandated to be cost-effective. Analyzing a unique DoD data set, we show that use of optimization models generate a 21% increase in military readiness and environmental protection or achieve the same benefits as benefit targeting at a cost saving of 37%.Item Stigma Mitigation and the Importance of Redundant Treatments(Department of Applied Economics and Statistics, University of Delaware, Newark, DE., 2015-05) Kecinski, Maik; Keisner, Deborah Kerley; Messer, Kent D.; Schulze, William D.Disgust can evoke strong behavioral responses. Sometimes these extreme visceral responses can lead to stigmatization—an overreaction to a risk. In fact, disgust may be so inhibiting that it leads people to refuse to consume completely safe items such as treated drinking water, leading to important economic and policy implications. Using economic experiments, we provide a measure of the behavioral response to disgust. Our findings suggest that when monetary incentives are provided, the behavioral response may have been exaggerated by previous studies that have relied on survey methods. Furthermore, mitigation steps successfully reduce the stigma behavior. In fact, the results suggest that stigma is primarily reduced not by a specific mitigation step taken but by how many steps are taken consecutively. These results have important implications for policies addressing issues such as the global shortage of drinking water. Some efforts to resolve the shortage have involved recycled water that is completely safe to drink but is often rejected because of reactions of disgust.