Longtime readers of this blog (or anyone who has talked to me in the past few years) know that I have been working on a paper on risk compensation and HIV. Risk compensation typically means that when an activity becomes more dangerous, people do less of it. If the risk becomes sufficiently high, however, the rational response can be to take more risks instead of fewer, a pattern called “rational fatalism”. This happens because increased risks affect not only the danger of additional acts, but also the chance that you have already contracted HIV based on past exposures. While HIV testing appears to mitigate this problem, by resolving people’s HIV status, a similar logic applies for unavoidable exposures in the future; HIV testing cannot do anything about the sense that you will definitely contract the virus in the future. I test this model used a randomized field experiment in Malawi…
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Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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