Conference Agenda

Despite some of the world's worst air quality, fewer than 1\% of middle-class households in Dhaka, Bangladesh own air purifiers. We investigate this puzzle through two field experiments. First, we document that households significantly underestimate indoor pollution levels and purifier effectiveness. Although households that receive monitors or demonstrations update their beliefs, neither information provision nor interest-free loans increase willingness to pay. Second, we remove adoption barriers entirely by providing purifiers for free and compensating households for the electricity cost, yet households use them for only 30 minutes a day, resulting in no measurable health benefits. We show that accounting for this low usage substantially changes the results of standard methods for measuring the value of clean air from purchase decisions or WTP elicitation of defensive technologies, which typically assume full utilization. Instead we estimate the Marginal Willingness to Pay (MWTP) directly from objective, high-frequency usage choices and randomized variation in operating costs and find that MWTP for cleaner air is far smaller than previous estimates and tightly bound around zero. These findings suggest that low adoption of defensive technologies in highly polluted environments reflects low private valuation of the environmental amenity itself.