Evaluating Decision Strategies for Equity of Public Risks

Many important decisions include the loss of life among their possible consequences. Alternative actions have different implications for the number of possible fatalities, the equity of those eventual fatalities, and the equity of the process resulting in those fatalities. This paper defines a concept of ex ante risk equity to address the equity of the process and distinguishes this concept from the ex post risk equity of the fatalities. The paper indicates that an analysis of decision strategies addresses ex ante equity. In this context, both types of equity as well as loss of life are included in a von Neumann-Morgenstern utility model developed to evaluate public risks. This approach provides a method to investigate the implications of different value judgments in examining alternatives and illustrates an appropriate use of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility for problems involving social consequences such as public risks.