Willingness to pay (WTP), most economists believe, is an appropriate benefits metric for government expenditure and regulatory policies that reduce risks to human life. It depends, however, on the distribution of risk and wealth. Currently, society's expenditures overemphasize concentrated risks, say after-the-fact treatment as opposed to prevention. A "dead-anyway" effect complements excess attention to intense interests in explaining this. Our normative criterion for spending on risk reduction is what a rational, albeit uninsured, individual confronting lotteries on future risks to life and wealth would choose for himself. This requires correcting WTP to eliminate the dead-anyway effect but continues to reflect that wealth enhances the utility of living.

This paper examines the entry implications of physician advertising. Evidence suggests that advertising inhibits entry into this market. Nevertheless. experienced physicians (incumbents), to whom advertising would offer the greatest financial benefit, in fact advertise less--a paradox that may be explained by nonfinancial concerns, such as unwillingness to break well-internalized professional norms against advertising. Physician advertising has risen sharply in recent years, and it appears that this trend will continue. If incumbents increasingly resort to advertising, there could be a substantial redistribution of income from less-well-established physicians to better-established ones.

Milton C. Weinstein, Richard J. Zeckhauser; Use Patterns for Depletable and Recycleable Resources12, The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 41, Issue 5, 1 Decem

I. Introduction, 371. — II. The simple model, 372. — III. Market equilibrium in the simple model, 375. — IV. The extended model — optimal and equilibrium allocation with nonzero extraction costs, 377. — V. Equilibrium with uncertain future demand, 381. — VI. Monopoly behavior, 387. — VII. Summary and conclusion, 389. — Appendix: proof of the optimality of the N-period market equilibrium under uncertainty if suppliers are risk-neutral, 390.

On introduit et on etudie une condition comportementale significative sur les fonctions d'utilite pour les richesses qui signifie qu'une loterie indesirable ne peut jamais etre rendue desirable par la presence d'une loterie indesirable independante

[This analysis generalizes the concept of a private-goods contract curve to an economy with public goods. It provides a derivation of the properties of the set of Pareto-optimal points in n-space. The paper concentrates on situations where the taxation system for financing the public goods is externally imposed; the efficiency goal is thus "mechanism-constrained Pareto optimality." The results of the main analysis are applied to assess performance of several group decision procedures.]