Measuring Stigma: The Behavioral Implications of Disgust

Abstract

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)