How much would you be willing to pay to have superhero powers? Obviously, the answer depends on the type of superhero powers, so let me be more specific. How much would you be willing to pay to be able to fly? Or have mind control? Or teleport? Or to have superhuman strength? These are the questions that this recent article by Julian Hwang (West Virginia University) and Dongso Lee (Korea Rural Economic Institute), published in the Journal of Cultural Economics (ungated version here) attempts to answer.
Hwang and Lee conducted a discrete choice experiment, which involved asking research participants to choose a superpower. However, each alternative came with a 'price' measured in terms of a shorter life expectancy. So, Hwang and Lee note that the resulting estimate of willingness-to-pay is really a 'willingness-to-sacrifice', since the cost is expected years of life foregone.
Their sample is made up of 51 undergraduates at the University of Florida. Each research participant was presented with ten choice tasks, each of which looked something like this (from Figure 1 in the paper):
Hwang and Lee then use a mixed logit model to estimate the willingness to sacrifice (WTS) for each of the four superpowers, for two experimental groups. The treatment group was asked to swear that they will give truthful answers to each question, while the control group was not. Hwang and Lee find that, for the treatment group:
...the mean WTS for mind-control, flight, teleportation, and supernatural physical strength is 3.2 years, 2.07 years, 5.04 years, and 2.95 years, respectively. For the control group, the mean WTS is 2.04 years, 2.95 years, 4.01 years, and 3.9 years, respectively.
Hwang and Lee then use the value of a statistical life-year to estimate the willingness-to-pay for each superpower, finding that:
The mean WTP for mind-control, flight, teleportation, and supernatural physical strength is $332,579, $215,137, $523,812, and $306,596, respectively.
So it appears that, of the four superpowers that Hwang and Lee asked about, teleportation is viewed as the most valuable. However, to a large extent, the results depend on how each superpower is described to the research participants. For teleportation, research participants were told:
You can transport a person or object from one point to another without traveling the physical space between them
You can also transport yourself
You can visit any places you want without spending money or time
The other superpowers were somewhat more limited. Mind-control was limited to controlling a single person, for five minutes at a time. Flight was limited to 100 miles per day. Super-strength was Captain America strength (the ability to press 800 pounds), not Superman-level strength. In comparison, the teleportation power does seem fairly unconstrained, so it's little wonder that it was valued the highest.
This study could definitely be built on, in at least two ways. First, if a study focused on a single superpower (flight, for example), it should be possible to recover the willingness-to-sacrifice for different aspects of the superpower - duration, maximum height, maximum flight speed, whether the superhero needs to remain awake in order to fly, and so on. Second, it would be interesting to know if there is a difference in the willingness-to-sacrifice between comic book fans (or superhero fans more generally) and other people.
These sorts of follow-up questions might even make a good project for a suitably interested (and motivated) Honours or Masters student. And before you think that the subject matter is not important, it is really the ability to apply the tools of non-market valuation (and discrete choice modelling) that is the important aspect of those sorts of projects. As well as just being a fun research question to think about!
[HT: Marginal Revolution, last year]
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