This paper reports on the results of a Monte Carlo investigation into the power of commonly employed procedures for identifying the 'correct' preference functional of individuals, and hence for discriminating between the large number of preference functionals now advocated in the theoretical...

This article extends the classic Rothschild-Stiglitz characterization of comparative risk ("increasing risk") in two directions. By adopting a more general definition of "mean preserving spread" (MPS), it provides a direct construction of a sequence of MPS's linking any pair of distributions...

This paper shows that QALYs can be derived from more elementary conditions than thought hitherto in the literature: it suffices to impose risk neutrality for life years in every health state. This derivation of QALYs is appealing because it does not require knowledge of concepts from utility...

Much of the evidence raising doubts about expected utility theory (EUT) comes from experiments involving hypothetical decisions. Most of the rest of the evidence comes from experiments where respondents are asked to make a large number of decisions, knowing that only one of these will provide...

Prescription dealing with redistribution questions are often influenced by the presumption that individuals behind a veil of ignorance will choose rules that lead to a greater equality of outcomes. However, such preferences may be fragile and dependent on particular circumstances. To the extent...

Generic utility theory, a general axiomatization of utility principles developed by Miyamoto (1988, 1992), is discussed as a formulation that captures a large class of utility theories. Several general mathematical functions were used to specify further the scaling of utility within this class...