The social value of risk reduction (SVRR) is the marginal social value of reducing an individual’s fatality risk, as measured by some social welfare function (SWF). This is the linchpin concept for applying social welfare functions to the domain of fatality risk regulation. This Article...

The paper reexamines the welfare economics of intergenerational risk. Risk and its resolution over time are modeled as a decision tree: in each period, the consumption of the current one-period living generation is to be traded-off against uncertain benefits of future generations; as time...

Willingness to take risk depends on whether the risk affects others as well as oneself and on how the risk affects oneś position vis-á-vis others. Taking a bet can improve oneś position relative to others or threaten it. We present an experiment that explores individual attitudes to lotteries...

The paper reexamines the welfare economics of intergenerational risk. Risk and its resolution over time are modeled as a decision tree: in each period, the consumption of the current one-period living generation is to be traded-off against uncertain benefits of future generations; as time...

We refine the understanding of individual preferences across social lotteries, whereby the payoffs of a pair of subjects are exposed to random shocks. We find that aggregate behavior is ex-post and ex-ante inequality averse, but also that there is a wide variety of individual preferences and...

Suppose that there exists a positive (exogenous) probability that at each date of a possibly infinite future, the human species will disappear. We postulate an Ethical Observer (EO) who must solve an intertemporal welfare maximization problem under this kind of uncertainty, with preferences that...

In a simple model where agents have ordinal and interpersonally noncomparable subjective expected utility preferences over uncertain future incomes, we analyze the implications of equity, efficiency, separability, and social rationality. Our efficiency conditions are fairly weak, because there...

The paper reexamines the ethics of intergenerational risk. When risk re-solves gradually, earlier decisions cannot depend on the realization of later shocks and, consequently, some inequalities across generations are inevitable. To account for these inequalities, risky intergenerational...

Standard economic theory assumes that individual risk taking decisions are independent from the social context. Recent experimental evidence however shows that the income of peers has a systematic impact on observed degrees of risk aversion. In particular, subjects strive for balance in the...