One challenging task faced by US government agencies is determining whether the benefits of their proposed regulations justify the costs. For benefits associated with reducing the risks of premature mortality, they rely on an analytic construct—the value per statistical life (VSL)—which...

We introduce a new "different lives" survey format, which asks respondents to rank hypothetical lives described in terms of longevity, health, happiness, income, and other elements of the quality of life. In this short paper, we show that the format is of policy relevance whether a mental state,...