An Experimental Economic Study On Ex Ante And Ex Post Methods Of Risk Prevention: Based On Consumers’ View

Modern society is a risk society, in which manufactured risks has great influence on social lives. It is a significant to put our eyes on risk prevention. All the methods of risk prevention can be divided in two types: ex ante methods which focus on potential injurers’ behavior, building direct standards on potential injurers’ behavior before accidents happened; ex post methods which focus on the compensation after accidents, pushing potential injurers taking care of their behavior indirectly. In this paper, we explored consumers’ utilities under ex ante methods and ex post methods, and found consumers’ preference on these two methods. Utility function and economic experiment were used in this paper.We built a utility function to explore consumers’ utilities under budget constraint. When consuming one unit of commodity without budget constraint, consumers’ preferences differ by their expected loss: consumers whose expected loss higher than average level get higher utilities under ex post methods; consumers whose expected loss lower than average level get higher utilities under ex ante methods. However, when consuming more than one unit of commodities with budget constraint, consumers with high expected loss higher than average level may still get higher utility under ex ante methods. That means consumers prefer ex ante methods in this condition.We conducted an economic experiment to testify consumers’ preference between ex ante methods and ex post methods under the same utilities. We assumed a risk of eating dried pork slices which were made from pork from diseased or dead pigs.We also designed two options with the same utility which represented ex ante and ex post methods. The result showed that subjects preferred ex ante methods significantly, regardless of their gender, age, family condition, concern of risks, even their expected losses. But the like of fried pork slices do have influence on their preference.The conclusion is that consumers prefer ex ante methods. That is to say, for the sake of avoiding risks, consumers prefer precaution before accidents than compensation after accidents.