Are distributional preferences for safety stable? A longitudinal analysis before and after the COVID-19 outbreak

Arroyos-Calvera, Danae; Covey, Judith; McDonald, Rebecca

Abstract

Policy makers aim to respect public preferences when making trade-offs between policies, yet most estimates of the value of safety neglect individuals' preferences over how safety is distributed. Incorporating these preferences into policy first requires measuring them. Arroyos-Calvera et al. (2019) documented that people cared most about efficiency, but that equity followed closely, and self-interest mattered too, but not enough to override preferences for efficiency and equity. Early 2020 saw the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic. This event would impose major changes in how people perceived and experienced risk to life, creating an opportunity to test whether safety-related preferences are stable and robust to important contextual changes. Further developing Arroyos-Calvera et al.’s methodology and re-inviting an international general population sample of participants that had taken part in pre-pandemic online surveys in 2017 and 2018, we collected an April 2020 wave of the survey and showed that overall preferences for efficiency, equity and self-interest were remarkably stable before and after the pandemic outbreak. We hope this offers policy makers reassurance that once these preferences have been elicited from a representative sample of the population, they need not be re-estimated after important contextual changes.

Citation

Arroyos-Calvera, D., Covey, J., & McDonald, R. (2023). Are distributional preferences for safety stable? A longitudinal analysis before and after the COVID-19 outbreak. Social Science & Medicine, 324, Article 115855. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115855

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Acceptance Date: Mar 17, 2023
• Online Publication Date: Mar 23, 2023
• Publication Date: 2023-05
• Deposit Date: Mar 31, 2023
• Publicly Available Date: Mar 24, 2024
• Journal: Social Science & Medicine
• Print ISSN: 0277-9536
• Electronic ISSN: 1873-5347
• Publisher: Elsevier
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 324
• Article Number: 115855
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.socscimed.2023.115855