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Webinar June 17 Thursday 2-3pm ET How psychology and economics can be brought together to inform and drive policy

  • 1.  Webinar June 17 Thursday 2-3pm ET How psychology and economics can be brought together to inform and drive policy

    Posted 06-15-2021 10:55

     

     

    JOIN US FOR THE NEXT HIBAR RESEARCH ALLIANCE WEBINAR:

     

    Improving the National Flood Insurance Program:

    How psychology and economics can be brought together to inform and drive policy

     

    Thursday, June 17, 2021

    11am-noon PT (2-3pm ET)

     

    All are welcome - please feel free to share this event notice.

     

     

    Dr. Howard Kunreuther

    Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center

    University of Pennsylvania

     

     

     

     

    During this HIBAR Research Alliance webinar, Dr. Howard Kunreuther will discuss how psychology and economics can be brought together to help society better manage low-probability, high-consequence events related to technological and natural hazards. Our innate human biases make it difficult for us to assess the risk of unlikely events, and it is important to understand that while we cannot prevent these biases, it is both possible and necessary to develop and implement policies that manage the risks appropriately. Dr. Kunreuther's work has required deep and long-term collaborations with a wide range of partners, including policy makers, insurance providers, and disaster management experts.

    He will describe the specific example of how biases related to risk assessment lead people to decide against buying flood insurance, despite living in flood-prone areas. His work has shown that a behavioral risk audit can assist in designing a strategy to both encourage property owners to purchase insurance and to invest in cost-effective measures to protect themselves against future disaster losses. This work has informed new policies recently developed by the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) and currently under debate within the U.S. Congress.

    Protection against disastrous flood losses is just one example of the importance of behavioral economics in informing and driving effective policies. The current coronavirus pandemic has intensely highlighted the destructive consequences of our inability to intuitively grasp the concepts of exponential growth, and we have the opportunity to learn from this pandemic experience to address the exponentially growing threat of climate change. Dr. Kunreuther will briefly describe how society's response to exponential growth processes, whether or not we are able to recognize them, needs to be swift and aggressive. Co-led, use-inspired basic (HIBAR) research is at the center of this work.

    Howard Kunreuther is co-director of the Wharton Risk Management and Decision Processes Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He is co-author, with Robert Meyer, of The Ostrich Paradox: Why We Underprepare for Disasters (Wharton School Press, 2017).

     

    REGISTER HERE

     

    For more information about the HIBAR Research Alliance, visit www.hibar-research.org.

     

     

    Email sent to: kcao@wlu.ca

    HIBAR Research Alliance
    6224 Agricultural Road
    Vancouver, British Columbia | V6T 1Z1 | Canada
    hibar.research.alliance@ubc.ca



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    Ke Cao
    Assistant Professor
    Wilfrid Laurier University
    Waterloo ON
    Canada
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