Adler Matthew D, Hammitt James K, Treich Nicolas
Duke Law School, 210 Science Drive, Box 90360, Durham, NC 27708, USA.
Harvard University (Center for Risk Analysis), 718 Huntington Avenue, Boston, MA 02115, USA; Toulouse School of Economics (LERNA-INRA), 21 allée de Brienne, 31000 Toulouse, France.
J Health Econ. 2014 May;35:82-93. doi: 10.1016/j.jhealeco.2014.02.001. Epub 2014 Feb 18.
We examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality risk reduction. These frameworks include classical, distributively unweighted cost-benefit analysis--i.e., the "value per statistical life" (VSL) approach-and various social welfare functions (SWFs). The SWFs are either utilitarian or prioritarian, applied to policy choice under risk in either an "ex post" or "ex ante" manner. We examine the conditions on individual utility and on the SWF under which these frameworks display sensitivity to wealth and to baseline risk. Moreover, we discuss whether these frameworks satisfy related properties that have received some attention in the literature, namely equal value of risk reduction, preference for risk equity, and catastrophe aversion. We show that the particular manner in which VSL ranks risk-reduction measures is not necessarily shared by other welfarist frameworks.
我们研究了不同的福利主义框架如何评估降低死亡风险的社会价值。这些框架包括经典的、不考虑分配权重的成本效益分析——即“统计生命价值”（VSL）方法——以及各种社会福利函数（SWF）。社会福利函数要么是功利主义的，要么是优先主义的，以“事后”或“事前”的方式应用于风险下的政策选择。我们研究了个体效用和社会福利函数的条件，在这些条件下，这些框架对财富和基线风险表现出敏感性。此外，我们讨论了这些框架是否满足文献中已受到一定关注的相关属性，即降低风险的同等价值、对风险公平性的偏好以及对灾难的厌恶。我们表明，VSL对降低风险措施进行排序的特定方式不一定为其他福利主义框架所共有。
