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All Cancers Are not Created Equal: How Do Survival Prospects Affect the Willingness to Pay to Avoid Cancer?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 January 2023

Anna Alberini ,
Christoph M. Rheinberger  and
Milan Ščasný
Anna Alberini*
Affiliation:
AREC, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, USA
Christoph M. Rheinberger
Affiliation:
Risk Management, European Chemicals Agency, Helsinki, Finland
Milan Ščasný
Affiliation:
Environment Center and Institute of Economic Studies, Faculty of Social Sciences, Charles University, Prague, Czech Republic
*
*Corresponding author: e-mail: aalberin@umd.edu
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Abstract

Regulatory impact analyses of proposed environmental, occupational, and consumer product safety regulations often rely on a metric known as the Value per Statistical Case of Cancer (VSCC), that is, the public’s willingness to pay (WTP) for reductions in the risk of developing cancer. In this paper, we ask whether the VSCC depends on cancer survival prospects. We develop a simple theoretical model that shows that under standard assumptions the VSCC is decreasing in the chance of surviving cancer. We empirically test this prediction by means of a stated preference survey, where we ask subjects aged 45–60 from the general population in the Czech Republic to report information about their WTP for reductions in the risk of getting cancer. One half of the sample was told that, if they got cancer, the 5-year survival rate was 60 % (corresponding to the average survival chances across all types of cancer), while the other half was told that it was 75 %. Consistent with the theoretical model, we find that the VSCC is larger in the former group. The ratio between the VSCC of the two groups is approximately equal to the ratio between the conditional cancer mortality risks implied by the survey’s survival rates, suggesting that the VSCC is proportional to conditional cancer mortality. Our findings have important policy implications in the context of regulations that focus on pollutants linked to cancers with different chances of survival.

Keywords

baseline riskcancer riskstated preferencesVSCCVSLI18J17K32Q51
Type
Article
Information
Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis , Volume 14 , Issue 1 , Spring 2023 , pp. 93 - 113
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Society for Benefit-Cost Analysis

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