Ideally, it would be desirable if we could all adopt a high-minded commitment to a risk-free existence. Unfortunately, such an objective is beyond our reach--politicians who advocate higher taxes rarely get elected and economists who indicate that our resources are limited are often portrayed as purveyors of pessimism. Fatal Tradeoffs culminates and synthesizes the research of the government's expert on the value of life and risk regulation. Viscusi's work in the social regulation of risk, this volume covers topics relating to the value and empirical estimates of life, the rationality of individual responses to risk, and the role of government policy. In addition to a careful selection of his writings, Fatal Tradeoffs includes a new survey of the value-of-life literature, a review of the 1980s regulatory reforms, and guidelines for risk policy. Balanced with case studies, the more technical articles have been opened to include policy ramifications, making the text accessible to professionals and academics alike.

Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk

Business & Money

Viscusi, W. Kip

Insurance

Oxford University Press

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 smoking. It provides 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 several issues, including: the sources of information that people have about the risks of smoking, the accuracy of their perceptions of 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 smoking behavior. With its detailed empirical data and its examination of individual decision-making processes, this work will interest researchers in public health, public policy analysis, psychology, and economics, as well as anyone concerned with this important issue.

Smoking: Making the Risky Decision

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Addiction & Recovery

Ideally, it would be desirable if we could all adopt a high-minded commitment to a risk-free existence. Unfortunately, such an objective is beyond our reach--politicians who advocate higher taxes rarely get elected and economists who indicate that our resources are limited are often portrayed as purveyors of pessimism. Fatal Tradeoffs culminates and synthesizes the research of the government's expert on the value of life and risk regulation. This volume presents Viscusi's work in the social regulation of risk, this volume covers topics relating to the value and empirical estimates of life, the rationality of individual responses to risk, and the role of government policy. In addition to a careful selection of his writings, Fatal Tradeoffs includes a new survey of the value-of-life literature, a review of the 1980s regulatory reforms, and guidelines for risk policy. Balanced with case studies, the more technical articles have been opened to include policy ramifications, making the text accessible to professionals and academics alike.

Economics

This book provides a comprehensive and accessible synthesis of Viscusi's 1996 Arne Ryde Memorial lectures on risk policy. In this volume, Viscusi explores the various forms of irrationality exemplified in individual risk behavior and the role government policy has played in institutionalizing these biases. He examines the implications for government policy of consumers and workers' risk beliefs and behavioral responses to risk. In addition to a critique of current risk analysis practices, he suggests strategies for rational risk management, including hazard warnings efforts, direct regulation, and liability as alternative modes of intervention.

Rational Risk Policy: The 1996 Arne Ryde Memorial Lectures (Ryde Lectures)

Clarendon Press

Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide

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 that judges (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.

Payne, John W.

Hastie, Reid

Schkade, David A.

Sunstein, Cass. R.

Rules & Procedures

University of Chicago Press

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. 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.

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.

Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Postmortem on the Tobacco Deal (Studies in Law and Economics)

Industries

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.

Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, fifth edition (Mit Press)

Harrington Jr., Joseph E.

Sappington, David E.M.

The MIT Press

Hazardous wastes often head the public's list of environmental concerns. Exaggerated estimates of cancer epidemics arising from waste sites generate a sense of alarm, but little is known about the real extent of the health threats. In this book James T. Hamilton and W. Kip Viscusi present the first comprehensive analysis of the magnitude of hazardous waste risks and of the efficacy of the Environmental Protection Agency's Superfund program.
By matching agency decision data to detailed census information using geographic information systems (GIS) technology, the authors show that most hazardous waste sites do not pose sufficient risk to merit the most stringent cleanup options. Those sites that do pose considerable risk to exposed populations often receive inadequate attention, because government decisions to target cleanups are based more on political factors than on actual risks. The authors propose policy reforms that could significantly reduce cleanup costs without sacrificing the protection of human health. Beyond its analysis of a particular risk policy, the book serves as a general model for comprehensive risk analysis.

Calculating Risks? The Spatial and Political Dimensions of Hazardous Waste Policy (Regulation of Economic Activity) (M I T PRESS SERIES ON THE REGULATION OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY)

Hamilton, James T.

Mit Pr

"Incisive and up-to-date, this textbook lucidly explains the economic principles underlying effective regulatory and antitrust policies and provides a thorough examination of their consequences." -- Richard Zeckhauser, Ramsey Professor, Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University 
This new edition of Economics of Regulation and Antitrust continues to place economic reasoning first and foremost in analyzing regulatory and antitrust issues. It remains the only text that introduces the field by stressing the economic theory and empirical analysis that provides the rationale for government intervention in the market. The focus on economic principles, however, does not exclude treatment of institutional aspects of regulation and antitrust policy, which are explored in extensive case studies on mergers, cable television, and transportation regulation, among other topics. Following two introductory chapters, the text is divided into three parts: antitrust policy, economic regulation, and social regulation. Each part can be used separately for a variety of courses. Questions and problems appear at the end of almost every chapter. New topics, such as regulation of environmental tobacco smoke, have been added to the second edition, and other topics, such as pharmaceutical regulation and the new price competition in electric power, have been given entirely new treatments to reflect the changing emphases of government policy. The chapters on the airline, cable television, and telecommunications industries have been updated, and studies assessing the impact of airline deregulation on market concentration, air fares, and airline safety have been revised. There are extensive reviews of important regulatory changes regarding cable television rates. And sections have been added to cover such major regulatory issues as telecommunication and the digital convergence of communications, computers, and entertainment and their impact on both traditional and wireless local telephone, long distance telephone, and cable televison.

Economics of Regulation and Antitrust

Vernon, John M.

Harrington, Joseph E., Jr.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Viscusi, W. Kip. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Viscusi, W. Kip

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Viscusi, W. Kip. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk

Smoking: Making the Risky Decision

Fatal Tradeoffs: Public and Private Responsibilities for Risk

Rational Risk Policy: The 1996 Arne Ryde Memorial Lectures (Ryde Lectures)

Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide

Punitive Damages: How Juries Decide

Smoke-Filled Rooms: A Postmortem on the Tobacco Deal (Studies in Law and Economics)

Economics of Regulation and Antitrust, fifth edition (Mit Press)

Calculating Risks? The Spatial and Political Dimensions of Hazardous Waste Policy (Regulation of Economic Activity) (M I T PRESS SERIES ON THE REGULATION OF ECONOMIC ACTIVITY)

Economics of Regulation and Antitrust