| When confronted by catastrophic wildfire risk, homeowners living in wildland urban interface (WUI) zones simultaneously allocate resources between insurance and averting activities. Standard expected utility theory suggests that complete insurance coverage precludes investment in averting activities. However, when potential losses include a significant non-market component, optimal choice includes both. This study presents results of a contingent valuation survey and induced value experiments exploring this complex decision making process. In both settings, private and public risk-averting options were simultaneously offered for purchase with insurance. Both the experiments and household surveys included an identical split-sample treatment to test the influence of wildfire risk information on willingness to pay values and averting share.;Results suggest that existence of full insurance coverage, amenity values, subjective risk perception, averting efficacy perception, and income positively influenced willingness to pay, averting participation, and averting share, and that provision of risk information had the predicted ordering effect, with willingness to pay increasing with risk zone. In addition, demographic factors including age, household size, party affiliation, and education influenced both willingness to pay values and averting share, with the direction of effect mixed across settings. Importantly, this research corroborates the prediction that significant demand for averting activities will exist to the extent that they provide a form of self-insurance for losses in non-market values and other non-reimbursable aspects of homeownership.;The results have important implications for federal wildfire risk reduction policy. In particular, programs to induce efficient levels of averting activity by WUI homeowners should be successful when clear links between averting activities and preservation of amenities associated with nearby forests are made. Such programs should also benefit from the dissemination of accurate risk information, and from efforts to publicize the efficacy of thinning, prescribed burning, and other tools to reduce wildfire risk. |
