Regulations to promote health and safety may be costly relative to the expected health and safety benefits, and may actually have negative effects on health and safety. These negative effects, or costs, may be due to reduced private spending on health and safety, moral hazard, or the creation of new risks. This volume considers the use of costs--benefit analysis, risk--risk analysis, and health--health analysis to determine the mortality cost associated with regulatory expenditures.

The current products liability crisis is both familiar and puzzling: million-dollar awards for apparently frivolous claims, inadequate settlements for thousands of people with severe injuries, skyrocketing insurance premiums, an overburdened judicial system. The adverse effects of this crisis on product innovation may be particularly detrimental to the extent that they deprive consumers of newer and safer goods.

W. Kip Viscusi offers the first comprehensive and objective analysis of the crisis. He employs extensive, original empirical data to diagnose the causes and to assess the merits of alternative reform policies.

Drawing on both liability insurance trends and litigation patterns, Viscusi shows that the products liability crisis is not simply a phenomenon of the 1980s but has been developing for several decades. He argues that the principal causes have been the expansion of the doctrine of design defect, the emergence of mass toxic torts, and the increase in lawsuits involving hazard warnings. This explanation differs sharply from that of most other scholars, who blame the doctrine of strict liability. Viscusi reformulates the concept of design defect, grounding it in sound economic analysis. He also evaluates public policy regarding hazard warnings and proposes a new national approach.

More generally, the author sketches a comprehensive social risk policy, in which tort liability interacts with government health and safety regulation to foster a coherent set of institutional responses to health and safety risks. Reforming Products Liability will be of special interest to lawyers, judges, policymakers, economists, and all those interested in legal policy and healthand safety issues.

The September 11, 2001 terrorism attack on the United States has led government officials to rethink anti-terrorism policies and researchers to assess the implications for the study of risk and uncertainty. This book draws on the expertise of eminent researchers in several risk-related fields to assess three substantive areas of concern - risk beliefs, insurance market effects, and policy responses.

The risk belief analyses consider several key questions. How do people think about the risks of terrorism? What are their attitudes toward these risks? To what extent are these low probability and highly dramatic risks overestimated?

Several chapters present original survey results analyzing these different aspects of terrorism risk assessments. These studies also begin to explore how people might be willing to sacrifice civil liberties to reduce the risk of terrorism and whether perceived terrorism risks are affected by the severity of the outcome and by proximity to past terrorist attacks.

The insurance industry incurred financial losses generated by the terrorism attack. The risks had not been foreseen and were not reflected in insurance pricing. These new terrorism risks generated considerable uncertainty for insurance markets, leading to insurance stock price declines that are documented in this book. Subsequently, a stock price rebound occurred, particularly for the higher quality firms.

A third pair of essays deals with policy responses to terrorism risks. A central theme of these analyses is that protective actions by one party have fundamental effects on the risks posed to others. Making airlines immune to terrorist attack may shift the terrorism attacks elsewhere, diminishing the net improvement in security. The papers included here examine how resources should be targeted given these offsetting effects.

Contributors to this volume include J. David Cummins, Neil A. Doherty, Baruch Fischhoff, Geoffrey Heal, Howard Kunreuther, Cass R. Sunstein, W. Kip Viscusi, and Richard J. Zeckhauser, among others.

The September 11, 2001 terrorism attack on the United States has led government officials to rethink anti-terrorism policies and researchers to assess the implications for the study of risk and uncertainty. This book draws on the expertise of eminent researchers in several risk-related fields to assess three substantive areas of concern - risk beliefs, insurance market effects, and policy responses.

The risk belief analyses consider several key questions. How do people think about the risks of terrorism? What are their attitudes toward these risks? To what extent are these low probability and highly dramatic risks overestimated?

Several chapters present original survey results analyzing these different aspects of terrorism risk assessments. These studies also begin to explore how people might be willing to sacrifice civil liberties to reduce the risk of terrorism and whether perceived terrorism risks are affected by the severity of the outcome and by proximity to past terrorist attacks.

The insurance industry incurred financial losses generated by the terrorism attack. The risks had not been foreseen and were not reflected in insurance pricing. These new terrorism risks generated considerable uncertainty for insurance markets, leading to insurance stock price declines that are documented in this book. Subsequently, a stock price rebound occurred, particularly for the higher quality firms.

A third pair of essays deals with policy responses to terrorism risks. A central theme of these analyses is that protective actions by one party have fundamental effects on the risks posed to others. Making airlines immune to terrorist attack may shift the terrorism attacks elsewhere, diminishing the net improvement in security. The papers included here examine how resources should be targeted given these offsetting effects.

Contributors to this volume include J. David Cummins, Neil A. Doherty, Baruch Fischhoff, Geoffrey Heal, Howard Kunreuther, Cass R. Sunstein, W. Kip Viscusi, and Richard J. Zeckhauser, among others.

How society's undervaluing of life puts all of us at risk-and the groundbreaking economic measure that can fix it Like it or not, sometimes we need to put a monetary value on people's lives. In the past, government agencies used the financial "cost of death" to monetize the mortality risks of regulatory policies, but this method vastly undervalued life. Pricing Lives tells the story of how the government came to adopt an altogether different approach--the value of a statistical life, or VSL-and persuasively shows how its more widespread use could create a safer and more equitable society for everyone. In the 1980s, W. Kip Viscusi used the method to demonstrate that the benefits of requiring businesses to label hazardous chemicals immensely outweighed the costs. VSL is the risk-reward trade-off that people make about their health when considering risky job choices. With it, Viscusi calculated how much more money workers would demand to take on hazardous jobs, boosting calculated benefits by an order of magnitude. His current estimate of the value of a statistical life is $10 million. In this book, Viscusi provides a comprehensive look at all aspects of economic and policy efforts to price lives, including controversial topics such as whether older people's lives are worth less and richer people's lives are worth more. He explains why corporations need to abandon the misguided cost-of-death approach, how the courts can profit from increased application of VSL in assessing liability and setting damages, and how other countries consistently undervalue risks to life. Pricing Lives proposes sensible economic guideposts to foster more protective policies and greater levels of safety in the United States and throughout the world.

Regulations to promote health and safety may be costly relative to the expected health and safety benefits, and may actually have negative effects on health and safety. These negative effects, or costs, may be due to reduced private spending on health and safety, moral hazard, or the creation of new risks. This volume considers the use of costs--benefit analysis, risk--risk analysis, and health--health analysis to determine the mortality cost associated with regulatory expenditures.

How society's undervaluing of life puts all of us at risk-and the groundbreaking economic measure that can fix it Like it or not, sometimes we need to put a monetary value on people's lives. In the past, government agencies used the financial "cost of death" to monetize the mortality risks of regulatory policies, but this method vastly undervalued life. Pricing Lives tells the story of how the government came to adopt an altogether different approach--the value of a statistical life, or VSL-and persuasively shows how its more widespread use could create a safer and more equitable society for everyone. In the 1980s, W. Kip Viscusi used the method to demonstrate that the benefits of requiring businesses to label hazardous chemicals immensely outweighed the costs. VSL is the risk-reward trade-off that people make about their health when considering risky job choices. With it, Viscusi calculated how much more money workers would demand to take on hazardous jobs, boosting calculated benefits by an order of magnitude. His current estimate of the value of a statistical life is $10 million. In this book, Viscusi provides a comprehensive look at all aspects of economic and policy efforts to price lives, including controversial topics such as whether older people's lives are worth less and richer people's lives are worth more. He explains why corporations need to abandon the misguided cost-of-death approach, how the courts can profit from increased application of VSL in assessing liability and setting damages, and how other countries consistently undervalue risks to life. Pricing Lives proposes sensible economic guideposts to foster more protective policies and greater levels of safety in the United States and throughout the world.

In this major new work, Michael J. Moore and W. Kip Viscusi explore the question, "How are workers compensated for exposing themselves to the risk of physical injury while on the job?" The authors detail the diverse nature of labor market responses to job risks and the important role played by compensation-for-risk mechanisms. Following an overview of the literature, they present a number of unprecedented results. Comprehensive and systematic discussions of issues such as wage-risk tradeoffs, the effects of workers' compensation on wages and risk, the role of unions, and the role of product liability suits in job-related injuries make the volume an essential work for all those interested in risk policy and workplace safety. Among the major results presented for the first time are the first estimates of the value of life derived from recently released occupational fatality risk data from the National Traumatic Occupational Fatality Survey. From these same data the authors also demonstrate that higher workers' compensation benefit levels significantly reduce fatalities on the job--a finding that challenges virtually every other treatment of this topic.

Originally published in 1990.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of the leading textbook on government and business policy, presenting the key principles underlying sound regulatory and antitrust policy. Regulation and antitrust are key elements of government policy. This new edition of the leading textbook on government and business policy explains how the latest theoretical and empirical economic tools can be employed to analyze pressing regulatory and antitrust issues. The book departs from the common emphasis on institutions, focusing instead on the relevant underlying economic issues, using state-of-the-art analysis to assess the appropriate design of regulatory and antitrust policy. Extensive case studies illustrate fundamental principles and provide insight on key issues in regulation and antitrust policy. This fifth edition has been thoroughly revised and updated, reflecting both the latest developments in economic analysis and recent economic events. The text examines regulatory practices through the end of the Obama and beginning of the Trump administrations. New material includes coverage of global competition and the activities of the European Commission; recent mergers, including Comcast-NBC Universal; antitrust in the new economy, including investigations into Microsoft and Google; the financial crisis of 2007-2008 and the Dodd-Frank Act; the FDA approval process; climate change policies; and behavioral economics as a tool for designing regulatory strategies.

In this major new work, Michael J. Moore and W. Kip Viscusi explore the question, "How are workers compensated for exposing themselves to the risk of physical injury while on the job?" The authors detail the diverse nature of labor market responses to job risks and the important role played by compensation-for-risk mechanisms. Following an overview of the literature, they present a number of unprecedented results. Comprehensive and systematic discussions of issues such as wage-risk tradeoffs, the effects of workers' compensation on wages and risk, the role of unions, and the role of product liability suits in job-related injuries make the volume an essential work for all those interested in risk policy and workplace safety. Among the major results presented for the first time are the first estimates of the value of life derived from recently released occupational fatality risk data from the National Traumatic Occupational Fatality Survey. From these same data the authors also demonstrate that higher workers' compensation benefit levels significantly reduce fatalities on the job--a finding that challenges virtually every other treatment of this topic. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

This monograph assesses how the adverse health implications associated with regulatory costs can affect mortality risk by considering a broad group of federal regulations.

This volume examines state regulations for hazard warnings--for foods, drugs, and medical devices--and demonstrates why a federal warnings approach would be preferable.

Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in the number and magnitude of punitive damages verdicts rendered by juries in civil trials. Probably the most extraordinary example is the July 2000 award of $144.8 billion in the Florida class action lawsuit brought against the cigarette manufacturers. More puzzling were two recent verdicts against the auto manufacturer BMW in Alabama. In identical cases, argued in the same court before the same judge, one jury awarded $4 million in punitive damages, while the other awarded no punitive damages at all. In cases involving accidents, civil rights and the environment, multimillion dollar punitive awards have been a subject of intense controversy. But how do juries actually make decisions about punitive damages? To find out, the authors - specialists in psychology, economics and the law - present the results of controlled experiments with over 600 mock juries involving the responses of more than 8,000 jury-eligible citizens. They find that although juries tended to agree in their moral judgements about the defendant's conduct, they rendered erratic and unpredictable dollar awards. Jurors also tended to ignore instructions from the judges; showed "hindsight bias", believing that what happened should have been foreseen; and penalized corporations that had based their decisions on careful cost-benefit analyses. While judges made many of the same errors, they performed better in some areas, suggesting that judges (or other specialists) may be better equipped than juries to decide punitive damages. With a wealth of new data and a host of provocative findings, this book documents a wide range of systematic bias in jury behaviour and should be valuable for anyone interested in punitive damages, jury behaviour, human psychology and the theory of punishment.

This law school casebook was developed by a team of professors at Harvard Law School to introduce students with little or no quantitative background to the basic analytical techniques that attorneys need to master to represent their clients effectively. This casebook presents clear explanations of decision analysis, games and information, contracting, accounting, finance, microeconomics, economic analysis of the law, fundamentals of statistics, and multiple regression analysis. References and examples have been thoroughly updated for this 3rd edition, and exposition of a number of key topics has been reworked to reflect insights gained from teaching these topics using the 1st edition to many hundreds of Harvard Law students over the past decade.

Risk Regulation Lesson from Mad Cows analyses and compares the policy responses in the United Kingdom (U.K.) and the United States (U.S.) to the mad cow disease crisis. Although there was not nearly as many deaths related to Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease (vCJD) and bovine spongiform encephalopathy (BSE) as scientist had predicted, the U.K. mad cow experience is widely regarded as a major policy debacle. The authors review the policy failures in the U.K., and also explain why the absence of comparable crisis in the U.S. does not signal that the mad cow experience has been a U.S. policy success story. This monograph draws a number of lessons from the mad cow experience regarding how one should regulate invasive species risks and deal with dimly understood but potentially serious risks to large populations. Risk Regulations Lesson from Mad Cows is organized as follows. After a brief Introduction, Section 2 examines the nature of risks to animals and humans from BSE and vCJD. Section 3 presents a mainstream public policy framework to evaluate the welfare consequences of BSE and vCJD risk mitigation instruments. Section 4 examines how other governments have conceptualized the risks for policy purposes. After providing a chronology of the policy events and policy actions in Section 5, the authors examine issues pertaining to media coverage and risk communication in Section 6. Consumer responses to the informational environment are reviewed in Section 7, and governments' use of trade policy in Section 8. A controversial effort by one beef producer to have its beef certified as being BSE-free brings together a wide set of cross-cutting issues of risk communication, government regulation, litigation, and international trade, and will serve as the main policy case study in Section 9. Lastly, in Section 10 the authors conclude with a review of general lessons for regulatory policy learned from the crisis.

Are the risks of smoking exaggerated? Has there been an open and rational discussion about the risks of smoking? This book attempts to answer these and many other questions about the subject, providing a detailed empirical presentation on smoking behavior as a risky consumer decision. Using new empirical data based on several national and regional surveys, Viscusi addresses a number of important issues, including: the sources of information that people have about the risks of smoking, the accuracy of their perceptions of the risks associated with smoking, and the consistency of smoking decisions with other risky behavior - scrutinizing issues such as whether smokers value risk differently than those who wear safety belts. Viscusi also looks at the differences in age groups and how they assess these risks based on public information. He provides new insight into the degree to which individuals understand smoking risks and take these risks into account in their behavior. With its detailed empirical data and its examination of individual decision-making processes, this work will interest researchers in public health, public policy, psychology, and economics, as well as anyone concerned with this important issue.

This book is the culmination and synthesis of Viscusi's distinguished work in the social regulation of risk.

Analyzes the proper role of the government in the elimination of occupational health and safety hazards and evaluates the effectiveness of attempts to regulate industrial health risks.

The 1998 out-of-court settlements of litigation by the states against the cigarette industry totaled $243 billion, making it the largest payoff ever in our civil justice system. Two key questions drove the lawsuits and the attendant settlement: Do smokers understand the risks of smoking? And does smoking impose net financial costs on the states?
With "Smoke-Filled Rooms," W. Kip Viscusi provides unexpected answers to these questions, drawing on an impressive range of data on several topics central to the smoking policy debate. Based on surveys of smokers in the United States and Spain, for instance, he demonstrates that smokers actually "overestimate" the dangers of smoking, indicating that they are well aware of the risks involved in their choice to smoke. And while smoking does increase medical costs to the states, Viscusi finds that these costs are more than financially balanced by the premature mortality of smokers, which reduces their demands on state pension and health programs, so that, on average, smoking either pays for itself or generates revenues for the states.
Viscusi's eye-opening assessment of the tobacco lawsuits also includes policy recommendations that could frame these debates in a more productive way, such as his suggestion that the FDA should develop a rating system for cigarettes and other tobacco products based on their relative safety, thus providing an incentive for tobacco manufacturers to compete among themselves to produce safer cigarettes. Viscusi's hard look at the facts of smoking and its costs runs against conventional thinking. But it is also necessary for an informed and realistic debate about the legal, financial, and social consequences of the tobacco lawsuits.
People making $50,000 or more pay .08 percent of their income in cigarette taxes, but people with incomes of less than $10,000 pay 1.62 percenttwenty times as much. The maintenance crew at the Capitol will bear more of the "sin tax" levied on cigarettes than will members of Congress who voted to boost it.
Cigarettes are not a financial drain to the U.S. In fact, they are self-financing, as a consequence of smokers' premature mortality.
The general public estimates that 47 out of 100 smokers will die from lung cancer because they smoke. Smokers believe that 40 out of 100 will die of the disease. Scientists estimate the actual number of 100 smokers who will die from lung cancer to be between 7 and 13.

Over the past two decades, the United States has seen a dramatic increase in the number and magnitude of punitive damages verdicts rendered by juries in civil trials. Probably the most extraordinary example is the July 2000 award of $144.8 billion in the Florida class action lawsuit brought against cigarette manufacturers. Or consider two recent verdicts against the auto manufacturer BMW in Alabama. In identical cases, argued in the same court before the same judge, one jury awarded $4 million in punitive damages, while the other awarded no punitive damages at all. In cases involving accidents, civil rights, and the environment, multimillion-dollar punitive awards have been a subject of intense controversy.
But how do juries actually make decisions about punitive damages? To find out, the authors-experts in psychology, economics, and the law-present the results of controlled experiments with more than 600 mock juries involving the responses of more than 8,000 jury-eligible citizens. Although juries tended to agree in their moral judgments about the defendant's conduct, they rendered erratic and unpredictable dollar awards. The experiments also showed that instead of moderating juror verdicts, the process of jury deliberation produced a striking "severity shift" toward ever-higher awards. Jurors also tended to ignore instructions from the judges; were influenced by whatever amount the plaintiff happened to request; showed "hindsight bias," believing that what happened should have been foreseen; and penalized corporations that had based their decisions on careful cost-benefit analyses. While judges made many of the same errors, they performed better in some areas, suggesting thatjudges (or other specialists) may be better equipped than juries to decide punitive damages.
Using a wealth of new experimental data, and offering a host of provocative findings, this book documents a wide range of systematic biases in jury behavior. It will be indispensable for anyone interested not only in punitive damages, but also jury behavior, psychology, and how people think about punishment.