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

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.