Abstract
Man’s increased awareness of and control over his own safety has introduced puzzling questions concerning the value of life. The common practice of comparing projects on the basis of cost per expected life saved has two major inadequacies. First, the value of a change in the risk of death may depend on the level of risk. Secondly, there may be strong interdependencies in the value of risk avoidance to the members of a group. An approach which combines the preferences of individuals for wealth and life-death consequences through a collective utility function is suggested to overcome these deficiencies. A concept of collective risk aversion is introduced to account for differences between collective and individual risk preferences.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Acton, Jan Paul, “Evaluating Public Programs to Save Lives: The Case of Heart Attacks,” Rand Corporation Report R-9 50-RC, Santa Monica, California, January, 1973.
Bodily, Samuel E., Collective Choice with Multidimensional Consequences, Technical Report #127, Operations Research Center, M.I.T., July, 1976.
Ferreira, Joseph Jr., and Slesin, Louis, “Ovservations on the Social Impact of Large Accidents,” Technical Report #122, Operations Research Center, M.I.T., October 1976.
Fishburn, Peter C., Utility Theory for Decision Making, Wiley, New York, 1970.
Jones-Lee, Michael, “The Value of Changes in the Probability of Death or Injury,” Journal of Political Economy, Vol. 82, No. 4, (1974), pp. 835–849.
Keeney, Ralph L., and Kirkwood, Craig W., “Group Decision Making with Cardinal Social Welfare Functions,” Management Science, Vol. 22, No. 4, (December 1975), pp. 430–437.
Keeney, Ralph L., and Raiffa, Howard, Decision Analysis with Multiple Objectives, Wiley, New York, 1976.
Linnerooth, Joanne, “A Critique of Recent Modeling Efforts to Determine The Value of Life”, Research Memorandum, RM-75–67, International Institute of Applied Systems Analysis, Vienna, December 1975.
Meyer, Richard F., “Some Notes on Discrete Multivariate Utility,” Harvard Business School, Mimeographed Manuscript March, 1972.
Raiffa, Howard, “Preferences for Multi-Attributed Alternatives,” Rand Corporation Memorandum, RM-5 86 8–DOT/RC, Santa Monica, California, 1969.
Richard, Scott F., “Multivariate Risk Aversion, Utility Independence and Separable Utility Functions,” Management Science Vol. 22, No. 1 (September, 1975), pp. 12–21.
Schelling, T.C., “The Life You Save May be Your Own,” in Problems of Public Expenditure, edited by S.B. Chase, Brookings Institution, Washington, 1968.
Sen, Amartya, Collective Choice and Social Welfare, Holden Day, San Francisco, 1970.
Wilson, Richard, “The Costs of Safety,” New Scientist, Vol. 68, (30 October, 1975), pp. 274–275.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 1978 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Bodily, S.E. (1978). Evaluating Joint Life-Saving Activities under Uncertainty. In: Zionts, S. (eds) Multiple Criteria Problem Solving. Lecture Notes in Economics and Mathematical Systems, vol 155. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46368-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-46368-6_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-08661-1
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-46368-6
eBook Packages: Springer Book Archive