IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/inm/oropre/v30y1982i1p203-207.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Technical Note—Equity and Public Risk: Some Empirical Results

Author

Listed:
  • M. Hammerton

    (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England)

  • M. W. Jones-Lee

    (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England)

  • V. Abbott

    (University of Newcastle upon Tyne, England)

Abstract

Is the prospect of the certain loss of one (as yet unidentified) life in a population of N people equivalent to the exposure of the N people to independent risks of death of 1/ N each? In a recent issue of this journal Keeney argued that this would, in general, not be the case and showed that a preference for a more equitable distribution of physical risk implies a preference for the independent risks rather than the certain loss of unidentified life, while “catastrophe aversion” implies the reverse. In this note we report empirical results which suggest that a majority of individuals display “catastrophe aversion” rather than “equity proneness,” at least for the kind of alternatives described above.

Suggested Citation

  • M. Hammerton & M. W. Jones-Lee & V. Abbott, 1982. "Technical Note—Equity and Public Risk: Some Empirical Results," Operations Research, INFORMS, vol. 30(1), pages 203-207, February.
  • Handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:30:y:1982:i:1:p:203-207
    DOI: 10.1287/opre.30.1.203
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1287/opre.30.1.203
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1287/opre.30.1.203?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Emmanuel Kemel & Corina Paraschiv, 2018. "Deciding about human lives: an experimental measure of risk attitudes under prospect theory," Social Choice and Welfare, Springer;The Society for Social Choice and Welfare, vol. 51(1), pages 163-192, June.
    2. Ehsan Taheri & Chen Wang, 2018. "Eliciting Public Risk Preferences in Emergency Situations," Decision Analysis, INFORMS, vol. 15(4), pages 223-241, December.
    3. Christoph M. Rheinberger & Nicolas Treich, 2017. "Attitudes Toward Catastrophe," Environmental & Resource Economics, Springer;European Association of Environmental and Resource Economists, vol. 67(3), pages 609-636, July.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:inm:oropre:v:30:y:1982:i:1:p:203-207. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Asher (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/inforea.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.