Perceived Geotechnical Risk, Trust in Technical Assistance, and Willingness to Pay for Mitigation: A Cross-Sectional Study Among Residents and Construction Professionals in Cuenca, Ecuador

Landslide and slope-instability hazards increasingly threaten residential areas in rapidly urbanizing Andean cities, where informal construction is common and formal geotechnical assessment is limited. Protection Motivation Theory and the Theory of Planned Behavior have been widely applied to explain protective intention toward natural hazards, yet few studies have jointly examined perceived geotechnical risk, trust in technical assistance, and willingness to pay for mitigation within a single model. This study assessed these constructs, together with mitigation adoption intention, among 420 residents and construction-related professionals in Cuenca, Ecuador, using a cross-sectional, descriptive–correlational design. Data were collected through a structured online questionnaire with seven Likert-scale constructs and a contingent-valuation item, analyzed using non-parametric correlation and group-comparison tests, followed by confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. Perceived risk, trust, and mitigation intention were all high and positively associated, while economic constraint correlated positively, rather than negatively, with intention, an effect that a structural model showed to be fully mediated through intention instead of acting directly on willingness to pay, which points to a recognized structural barrier and not an individually suppressive one; attitudinal willingness to pay did not consistently predict the declared monetary amount, and civil engineering professionals reported higher willingness to pay than other groups. These findings indicate that respondents in this sample reported high risk awareness and trust in technical assistance, while perceived economic constraint was the dimension most consistently associated with lower stated readiness for geotechnical mitigation in this Andean urban context. These findings contribute empirical evidence on the perceptual, trust-related, and economic drivers of household engagement with geotechnical mitigation, informing sustainable, resilience-oriented approaches to reducing disaster risk in informally built urban settlements across the Andean region.