We surveyed economists’ attitudes toward adjusting discount rates to the risk profile of public programs. Three-quarters of respondents recommend to use project-specific discount rates. For example, on average, respondents discount railway infrastructures more than hospitals and climate mitigation. But the degree of discount discrimination between distinct risk profiles of different projects is fairly limited in our sample given the differences in risk profiles for these projects. Economic experts thus penalize risky public projects far less than financial markets penalize private investments. We call this the ”discount premium puzzle”. Finally, among experts in favor of a single discount rate, there is no consensus on whether it should be based on the average cost of capital in the economy, the sovereign borrowing cost, or the Ramsey rule, which gives rise to disagreement over the level of the recommended discount rate.

In this paper, we study the willingness to pay for reductions in health risks within a framework of anticipated regret. We show that ex post information provision can be a relevant factor for regret theory to account for why people are sometimes so inclined to protect themself against certain types of health risks but not others. In particular, we find that under full resolution of uncertainty disproportionate aversion to large regrets exaggerates willingness to pay estimates. The effect induced by this notion of regret aversion can be interpreted as if regret-averse people overweight risk reductions due to prevention. However, as feedback over forgone acts is missing, the regret aversion effect disappears. Finally, we show that information avoidance induced by regret aversion can significantly bias our evaluation to prefer those health programs that completely eliminate a risk, i.e., the certainty effect.