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. 2020 Jul;21(5):763-773.
doi: 10.1007/s10198-020-01171-2. Epub 2020 Mar 16.

Willingness to pay for an early warning system for infectious diseases

Sebastian Himmler  1 , Job van Exel  2   3 , Meg Perry-Duxbury  2 , Werner Brouwer  2
Affiliations

Willingness to pay for an early warning system for infectious diseases

Sebastian Himmler et al. Eur J Health Econ. 2020 Jul.

Abstract

Early warning systems for infectious diseases and foodborne outbreaks are designed with the aim of increasing the health safety of citizens. As a first step to determine whether investing in such a system offers value for money, this study used contingent valuation to estimate people's willingness to pay for such an early warning system in six European countries. The contingent valuation experiment was conducted through online questionnaires administered in February to March 2018 to cross-sectional, representative samples in the UK, Denmark, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and The Netherlands, yielding a total sample size of 3140. Mean willingness to pay for an early warning system was €21.80 (median €10.00) per household per month. Pooled regression results indicate that willingness to pay increased with household income and risk aversion, while they decreased with age. Overall, our results indicate that approximately 80-90% of people would be willing to pay for an increase in health safety in the form of an early warning system for infectious diseases and food-borne outbreaks. However, our results have to be interpreted in light of the usual drawbacks of willingness to pay experiments.

Keywords: Contingent valuation; Cross-country comparison; Early warning system; Infectious disease outbreaks; Willingness to pay.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Distribution of WTP values per country
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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