Knowledge acquisition cost and anti-seismic mitigation investment by individual households

This work considers the influence of the existence of the acquisition cost of the knowledge exerted on the anti-earthquake retrofit of a building. Household decision-making upon anti-seismic retrofit strategy is modeled as the following three staged problem: knowledge acquisition about anti-seismic retrofit technology, investigation of anti-seismic capacity of their houses and their retrofit. A comparative statistic analysis is conducted in order to describe the influence of the existence of the positive knowledge acquisition cost upon households´ retrofit decision making about investigation of the houses´ health conditions and retrofit of their houses. The paper concludes with some recommendations on the policies which can be used by the government in order to encourage individual investment for anti-disaster mitigation.