This article examines how public concern about different social problems changes over time in response to fluctuations in problem severity. Examining time series of concern and objective severity for nine different problems, both graphically and econometrically, we address three main questions....

One rational individual may be willing to pay less than another to insure a risk "epsilon" when another risk w is present even though he would pay more to insure any isolated risk, and even though E(" epsilon" w) = 0 for all w. Noticing this, Ross (1981) proposed excluding such reversals and...

A characterization of comparative risk, parallel to but more restrictive than the Rothschild-Stiglitz (1970) characterization, is developed. As in Rothschild and Stiglitz, we develop a four-way characterization that consists of generating processes (a noise condition and generation by a sequence...

This article shows that if Ross's definition of riskier is replaced by a more traditional definition, such as a mean-preserving spread or second-degree stochastic dominance, then the application of Ross's stronger measure of risk aversion to the portfolio problem may no longer produce the...

The evaluation of lifesaving programs whose benefits extend into the future involves two discounting issues. The intragenerational discounting problem is how to express, in age-j dollars, reductions in an individual's conditional probability of dying at some future age k. Havig discounted future...