There is no consensus among health economists about the specification of individual preferences that best fits observed behaviors. One crucial point of disagreement concerns the sign of the interaction between health and wealth in individual utility functions. We propose here a simple, static,...

This paper examines how priority setting in health care expenditures is influenced by the presence of uncertainty about the severity of the illness and the effectiveness of medical treatment. We provide necessary and sufficient conditions on social preferences under which a social planner will...

This paper presents a general result on the random selection of an element from an ordered sequence of risks and uses this result to derive additive and cross risk apportionment. Preferences favoring an improvement of the sampling distribution in univariate or bivariate first-order stochastic...

The existing literature on savings, insurance, and portfolio choices under risk has revealed that quite often comparative statics results depend, among other things, upon the values of the coefficients of relative risk aversion and relative prudence. More specifically the benchmark values for...