All in the balance: Assessing schemes to protect humans and the environment

Abstract

This paper is a distillation of research into an alternative approach to determining the Value of Preventing a Fatality. The traditional, approach is to determine this through “perceived preferences” through surveys of people, but there are significant difficulties in doing this, The paper considers a more “rational” approach based on economic theory. In this approach a utility function is derived which evaluates the expected future lifetime and the value of its loss as measured in terms of the loss of quality of life.