In a priority setting context, the attainment of a desirable allocation of health care resources is dependent upon the accurate estimation of health gains produced by different treatments and services. Therefore, the detection of disparities between methods of obtaining these estimates has...

Stated preference (SP) surveys attempt to obtain monetary values for non-market goods that reflect individuals’ “true” preferences. Numerous empirical studies suggest that monetary values from SP studies are sensitive to survey design and so may not reflect respondents’ true preferences....

The recognition that environmental hazards can affect children differently and more severely than adults has provoked growing concern in industrialized nations about the impact of environmental pollution on children’s health. In this paper, commissioned by the OECD, we are charged with...

We examine the effect of training the respondents regarding probabilities and risk reductions, in addition to using visual aids to communicate risk and risk reductions, in a contingent valuation survey of mortality risk reduction in Bangladesh. We elicit individuals’ risk perception and find...

We model the decision of whether or not to become a blood/living organ donor. The expected utility for becoming a donor is a function of the degree of altruism, the consumption of goods, the costs of donation, the very pleasure of giving, and the recipient’s utility associated to donation....

This paper demonstrates that the results recently presented by Shogren et al (1994) are insufficient to reject the endowment effect as a significant cause of the divergence between willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WPA) values. A more transparent means of testing for the...

We study the problem of risk sharing within a household or syndicate. A household shares risky prospects using a social welfare functional. We characterize the social welfare functionals such that the household is collectively less risk averse than each member, and satisfies the Pareto principle...

What are the welfare effects of the information contained in macroeconomic statistics, central-bank communications, or news in the media? We address this question in a business-cycle framework that nests the neoclassical core of modern DSGE models. Earlier lessons that were based on "beauty...

Forecasting electricity demand for future years is an essential step in resource planning. A common approach is for the system operator to predict future demand from the estimates of individual distribution companies. However, the predictions thus obtained may be of poor quality, since the...

This paper provides a rational choice-based analysis of the causes and consequences of surprise events. The paper argues that ignorance may be rational, but nonetheless produce systematic mistakes, inconsistent behavior, and both pleasant and unpleasant surprises. If ignorance and unpleasant...