Paternalistic Altruism and the Value of Statistical Life.

In applying the willingness-to-pay approach to the assessment of public-sector projects that have potential safety effects, it is clearly important to know whether and how values of statistical life and safety should reflect people's altruistic concern for other people's wellbeing. Thus far this question has been answered only for a very limited number of special cases. The purpose of this paper is to extend the analysis to cover a wider spectrum of degrees and types of altruistic concern than has so far been considered in the literature. Copyright 1992 by Royal Economic Society.