The health risk of smoking is valued using the contingent valuation method, applied to a Swedish sample of smokers. The respondents were asked to put a value on newly developed cigarettes with no associated health risks. The average additional willingness to pay for the new cigarettes is...

This paper discusses how a decision maker should deal with uncertainty, both in the sense of a well-known probability distribution of different outcomes and as a situation where also the probability distribution is unknown. A simple baseline model is used throughout the paper, where the decision...

Using a random sample of individuals in rural Bangladesh, this paper investigates people’s preferences regarding relative values of lives when it comes to different ages of the individuals being saved. By assuming that an individual has preferences concerning different states of the world, and...

Using a contingent valuation survey, people’s willingness to pay for a given risk reduction is found to be much larger when traveling by air compared to by taxi. Follow-up questions revealed that an important reason for this discrepancy is that many experience a higher mental suffering from...

A theoretical model of the ethical preferences of individuals is tested by conducting a choice experiment on safety-enhancing road investments. The relative value of a saved life is found to decrease with age, such that the present value of a saved year of life is almost independent of age at a...