The aim of the study reported in this paper is to test the hypothesis that individual utility of wealth functions may violate the assumption of smoothness that underpins the standard analysis of the Value of Statistical Life (VSL) and safety. In order to do so we examine the way in which the...

It is a well-established fact that many people view the prospect of premature death by some causes with considerably more disquiet or “dread” than death by other causes. It is equally clear that for most people their personal risk of death by a given cause is also a matter of serious...

How should a developed country quantify the costs and benefits of the safety externalities that its energy and environmental policies generate for a developing country and vice versa? This paper addresses this question within a conventional utilitarian welfare-economics framework on the...

The random preference, Fechner (or "white noise"), and constant error (or "tremble") models of stochastic choice under risk are compared. Various combinations of these approaches are used with expected utility and rank-dependent theory. The resulting models are estimated in a random effects...

A decision maker's attitude towards risk is said to be of order (i), (i) = 1, 2, if for every given risk (e) with expected value zero, the risk premium the decision maker is willing to pay to avoid the risk (te) goes with (t) to zero at the same order as t[superscript i]. This article presents...

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...

<Para ID="Par1">We propose a broad framework for individual choice under risk which can accommodate many stochastic formulations of various deterministic theories. Using this framework to guide an experimental design, we show that most individuals’ departures from the independence axiom cannot be explained by...</para>