Technical Note—Equity and Public Risk: Some Empirical Results

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.