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Seminar

Webinar: COVID19: Risk Perceptions and Pro-social Behavior

  • Series
    Micro Seminars
  • Speaker(s)
    Martin Abel (Middlebury College, United States)
  • Field
    Empirical Microeconomics
  • Location
    Online
  • Date and time

    July 10, 2020
    16:00 - 17:00

To attend this seminar, please send an email to: boring@ese.eur.nl

We collect data on age-specific COVID19 case mortality rates (CMRs) and show that people systematically overestimate the risk for younger and underestimate the risk for older people. Risk perceptions are affected by heuristic-based decision making (e.g. availability heuristic). In the second part of the paper we test if "debiasing" risk perceptions changes prosocial behavior. We find mixed evidence: informing people only about their own risk does not affect charitable giving and reduces people's willingness to learn about how to protect the elderly. These negative effects are offset once we include information on the CMR of older people.