Your Money, Your Life, or Your Freedom? A Discrete‐Choice Experiment on Trade‐Offs During a Public Health Crisis

Abstract

We conducted a discrete‐choice conjoint analysis on a sample of residents in Italy to explore trade‐offs between human lives, individual freedoms, and the economy that governments and their citizens face while coping with a public health crisis. Our results indicate that people prefer to avoid income losses over reduction in the number of victims by the same percentage. The relative preference for saving income over saving lives widens as the size of losses at stake increases. The duration of restrictions to individual freedoms per se does not appear to have a sizable impact on people's preferences once income and human losses are accounted for. Our study contributes to scholarship on the value of a statistical life and sheds light on morally problematic trade‐offs. Further, we illustrate how conjoint analysis through discrete choice modeling can address public administration and policy issues that are inherently multidimensional.

Liberté, Égalité, Crédibilité: An experimental study of citizens' perceptions of government responses to COVID‐19 in eight countries

“…Democracies, in particular, continuously rebalance these competing values in the face of major events (Kritz, 2019 ) and must deal with citizens' responses and reactions as a consequence of relevant policy decisions. From economic and legal perspectives, public sector strategies focused on safety concerns frequently involve trade‐offs between citizens' constitutional values and economic opportunities (Belle & Cantarelli, 2022 ).…”

“…Similarly, in the U.K., trust in government increased following the first lockdown (though it was followed by fluctuations later that year) (Davies et al, 2021). In Italy, a survey experiment found a strong preference for lockdown measures, particularly when they led to lower income losses and prevented deaths, irrespective of the duration of these restrictions (Belle & Cantarelli, 2022). Additionally, citizens' trust in Denmark, which opted for more stringent policies, was higher than in Sweden, which relied on principles of voluntarism and personal responsibility (Nielsen & Lindvall, 2021).…”

“…With the vast health, economic, and social impacts of COVID‐19 widely observed, the effects of government decisions and actions on citizens' attitudes need to be better understood. As with past pivotal events in history, policy and administrative solutions designed to contain the current global pandemic involve perplexing trade‐offs between several core public values, such as safety, democracy, economic prosperity, equity, and others (Alsan et al, 2021 ; Belle & Cantarelli, 2022 ). Efforts to slow the spread of the COVID‐19 infection have been tied to limiting freedom of movement, assembly, expression, and worship (Curley & Federman, 2020 ); in some cases, they have related to the centralization and expansion of state control, censorship, and surveillance.…”

“…We use a randomized experimental design that permits causal interpretations of relationships between public policy restrictiveness and performance information, on the one hand, and citizen assessments of governments' performance, on the other. Experimental research has become a cost‐effective tool for studying “morally problematic” or “taboo” trade‐offs and informing policies in public health and public safety crises (Belle & Cantarelli, 2022 ; Fiske & Tetlock, 1997 ). We survey residents in eight democracies affected by the pandemic—Canada, Denmark, Germany, Italy, South Korea, Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States—to get meaningful variation in the severity of the pandemic and institutional structures, as well as achieve greater generalizability.…”

Variations on a Theme of Resignation: Idling by, Backpedaling, or Driving Forward?

“…It is not unreasonable to ask whether modernizing and democratizing some cultural elements can help produce better governance outcomes." Belle and Cantarelli (2022) answer one of the enduring questions of the pandemic; they specifically explore the complex trade-offs between loss of human lives, individual freedoms, and the economy that governments and their citizens face while coping with a public health crisis. Looking at what they aptly refer to as morally problematic tradeoffs, they find a relative preference for saving income over saving lives that grows wider as the size of losses at stake increases.…”