Community adaptation to climate risks: employing a "think-aloud protocol" to understand decision-making in the context of floodplain buyouts
Date
2022
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Publisher
University of Delaware
Abstract
Floodplain communities throughout the United States continue to face severe, repeated flooding from extreme weather events and sea-level rise. The practice of managed retreat (relocation) can be used to address this issue by relocating homeowners outside of high flood prone areas. The most common form of managed retreat is a voluntary buyout program, in which the government offers to buy homes from homeowners. Homeowners who choose to sell their homes to the program may relocate to less flood prone areas, thereby decreasing their future flood risk. Buyouts can also benefit the environment and the overall community because federal law requires the purchased land to be converted into open space (e.g., wetlands, playgrounds, parks, or recreational fields) in perpetuity. Land that is converted into wetlands, for instance, may bolster communal flood resilience as additional wetlands increase water retention during future flood events. Despite these positive externalities, buyout programs continue to experience low acceptance rates among homeowners, resulting in fragmented, vacant lots that do not protect communities from future floods. This study uses a laboratory economics experiment to evaluate how alternative policy mechanisms affect decision making across four types of simulated buyout programs. Homeowner and student participants begin by testing the current practice of a posted price mechanism by accepting or rejecting a government offer for their home. Participants also test buyout programs with an agglomeration bonus and/or a target constraint. Within this framework, this thesis employs a “think-aloud protocol”, which asks participants to verbalize their thoughts as they navigate through the experiment. This meaningfully compliments the silent laboratory experiments by producing additional insights with respect to participants’ behavior, strategies, and emotions. Results indicate that homeowners are more likely to accept the buyouts than students and are less likely to change their minds when presented with new policy mechanisms (though overall behavior does not vary statistically, which may be due to the small sample size). Homeowner sessions, though longer than student sessions in length, produce less vocalizations that can be categorized and analyzed. Exploratory analyses of the statements also indicate that agglomeration bonuses and target constraints can elicit strong emotional reactions from some homeowners.
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Keywords
Experimental economics, Floodplain buyouts, Policy mechanisms, Think-aloud protocols