Impact of Information Gathering Behavior and Residential Distance on Risk Preferences against Reputational Harm Caused by the Fukushima Disaster in Japan

【abstract】 The massive earthquake that hit Japan on March 11, 2011, triggered an accident in the Fukushima No.1 nuclear power plant, adversely affecting the marine product processing industry by reputational harm. In order to find a solution, this paper examines the effects of information-gathering behavior and the distance from the power plant on the level of anxiety of processed marine products in the Miyagi prefecture, next to Fukushima prefecture. Ordered probit models with an instrumental variable were employed to estimate models without the endogeneity problem. The results indicate information-gathering behavior does not significantly affect the level of anxiety when considering the instrumental variables. On the other hand, the distance from the power plant was found to be correlated with such anxiety. Consequently, this study suggested that the farther the people lived from the plant, the higher was their tendency to avoid buying processed marine products made in the Miyagi prefecture, without gathering relevant information about the consumability of the products.