Preferences for lives, injuries, and age: A stated preference survey

• One of the more difficult ethical questions from a public decision-making perspective is whether the estimation of benefits from risk reducing projects should be influenced by factors such as age groups and risk domains. For example, should a project that saves the lives of elderly people be assigned a more different benefit value in cost-benefit analyses than one that saves the same number of children's lives? This paper examines the preferences of the general public in Sweden on these issues. We design a choice experiment in which subjects are required to make six pair-wise choices where the characteristics of each choice are accident type (fire and traffic), number of fatalities and serious injuries avoided, and age of those saved (515-, 3545- and 6575-year-olds). We find that avoiding the fatality of one 515-year-old is equivalent to avoiding 1.4 fatalities of 3545-year-olds. Likewise, avoiding the fatality of one 515-year-old is equivalent to avoiding 3.3 fatalities of 6575-year-olds. We find no significant differences between the causes of accident. One avoided fatality is found to be equivalent to around 3.5 avoided severe injuries, which is lower than the official value of 6 used by the Swedish Road Administration

Ämnesord

SAMHÄLLSVETENSKAP  -- Ekonomi och näringsliv -- Nationalekonomi (hsv//swe)

SOCIAL SCIENCES  -- Economics and Business -- Economics (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Economics

Nationalekonomi

Publikations- och innehållstyp

ref (ämneskategori)

art (ämneskategori)