title: The Role of Hedonic Behavior in Reducing Perceived Risk.
abstract: Understanding how human populations naturally respond to and cope with risk is important for fields ranging from psychology to public health. We used geophysical and individual-level mobile-phone data (mobile-apps, telecommunications, and Web usage) of 157,358 victims of the 2013 Ya'an earthquake to diagnose the effects of the disaster and investigate how experiencing real risk (at different levels of intensity) changes behavior. Rather than limiting human activity, higher earthquake intensity resulted in graded increases in usage of communications apps (e.g., social networking, messaging), functional apps (e.g., informational tools), and hedonic apps (e.g., music, videos, games). Combining mobile data with a field survey ( N = 2,000) completed 1 week after the earthquake, we use an instrumental-variable approach to show that only increases in hedonic behavior reduced perceived risk. Thus, hedonic behavior could potentially serve as a population-scale coping and recovery strategy that is often missing in risk management and policy considerations.
authors.affiliation: 1 Faculty of Business and Economics, The University of Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Jayson S
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: Jia
authors.affiliation: 2 CUHK Business School, The Chinese University of Hong Kong.
authors.forename: Jianmin
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Jia
authors.affiliation: 3 Booth School of Business, University of Chicago.
authors.forename: Christopher K
authors.initials: CK
authors.lastname: Hsee
authors.affiliation: 4 Graduate School of Business, Stanford University.
authors.forename: Baba
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Shiv
mesh_terms: D000223:Adaptation, Psychological / Q000502:physiology*; D040421:Cell Phone / Q000706:statistics & numerical data; D004190:Disasters; D055866:Earthquakes; D006801:Humans; D063731:Mobile Applications; D012308:Risk Management
keywords: crisis management; earthquake disaster recovery; hedonic coping behavior; mobile big data; perceived risk