Analysis of households' willingness to pay for residential building seismic resilience

The seismic resilience of buildings has attracted increasing research attention for earthquake prevention and damage mitigation. However, there have been few studies using economic analyses. This study minimized the building life-cycle costs with two models used to quantify the household willingness to pay (WTP) for improved residential building seismic resilience based on two subjective utility models using expected utility theory and prospect theory. Then, the household WTP for residential building seismic resilience was calculated and compared with the corresponding incremental costs using parameters from the Standard for Seismic Resilience Assessment of Buildings for selected new residential buildings in Beijing in 2017 as an example. The results show that improving the residential building seismic resilience to the 1 or 2 star levels is financially feasible. However, further development to the 3 star level still relies on government subsidies or other support. This study also provides some policy implications to increase the household WTP for building seismic resilience. © 2021, Tsinghua University Press. All right reserved.