The missing piece: Valuing averting behavior for children's ozone exposures

To link to full-text access for this article, visit this link: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.reseneeco.2006.02.002 Byline: Carol Mansfield, F. Reed Johnson, George Van Houtven Keywords: Hierarchical Bayes; Mixed logit; Children's environmental health; Revealed preference; Air quality index; Cost of illness Abstract: Individuals can reduce their exposure to air pollution by reducing the amount of time they spend outdoors. Reducing outdoor time is an example of an averting behavior that should be measured as part of willingness to pay (WTP) for improvements in air quality. In this paper, we estimate parents' WTP to prevent restrictions on a child's outdoor time from a stated-preference (SP) conjoint survey. We combine this WTP measure with an estimate of reductions in time spent outdoors on high-ozone days from an activity-diary study to estimate this averting behavior component of WTP for reductions in ozone pollution. Author Affiliation: Research Triangle Institute, P.O. Box 12194, Research Triangle Park, NC 27709-2194, United States