Exploring social welfare functions and violation of monotonicity: an example from inequalities in health

Abásolo, Ignacio; Tsuchiya, Aki

doi:10.1016/j.jhealeco.2003.08.003

Cited by 44 publications

(39 citation statements)

References 13 publications

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“…Andersson and Lyttkens (1999) reported a median marginal trade-off varying from 0.11 to 0.35 years of life expectancy among the worst off in exchange for 1 year lost among the best off in society, whereas this median was 0.45 in Johannesson and Gerdtham (1996). Abasolo and Tsuchiya (2004;2013) even found that people sometimes violate monotonicity in order to achieve a more equitable distribution; i.e., they sometimes prefer an outcome where all beneficiaries receive less but with a smaller difference between them.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Estimating sign-dependent societal preferences for quality of life

Attema

Brouwer

l’Haridon

et al. 2015

Journal of Health Economics

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ABSTRACT. This paper is the first to apply prospect theory to societal health-related decision making. In particular, we allow for utility curvature, equity weighting, sign-dependence, and loss aversion in choices concerning quality of life of other people. We find substantial inequity aversion, both for gains and losses, which can be attributed to both diminishing marginal utility and differential weighting of better-off and worse-off. There are also clear framing effects, which violate expected utility. Moreover, we observe loss aversion, indicating that respondents give more weight to one group's loss than another group's gain of the same absolute magnitude. We also elicited some information on the effect of the age of the studied group. The amount of inequity aversion is to some extent influenced by the age of the considered patients. In particular, more inequity aversion is observed for gains of older people than gains of younger people.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Estimating sign-dependent societal preferences for quality of life

Attema

Brouwer

l’Haridon

et al. 2015

Journal of Health Economics

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“…In other words, the final distribution of health could mean less health for both groups, so long as the inequality narrows. Again, such responses generate pathological social welfare functions in standard economics terms, but to us, and as we have argued elsewhere (Abasolo and Tsuchiya, 2004), are entirely plausible, particularly if health is seen as a pre-requisite for us to flourish as individuals (Anand, 2002, Culyer, 1971, Culyer, 1989. Median in bold * This implies a backward bending iso-welfare contour.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…For instance, Dolan et al has found that up to 20% of those interviewed had such preferences (Dolan et al, 2002). Such perceptions support a backward bending social welfare contour (Abasolo and Tsuchiya, 2004), which allows for the possibility that a move due north from certain points is associated with an inferior contour, because it implies moving away from 45 degree diagonal through the origin O. So this is another example of a conflict between a social welfare judgement placed within the gains space, and a social welfare judgement placed within the outcomes space.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

Equality of what in health? Distinguishing between outcome egalitarianism and gain egalitarianism

Tsuchiya

Dolan

2008

Health Economics

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When deciding how to weigh benefits to different groups, standard economic models assume that people focus on the final distribution of utility, health or whatever. Thus, an egalitarian is assumed to be egalitarian in the outcome space. But what about egalitarianism in the gains space, such that people focus instead on how equally benefits are distributed? This paper reports on a study in which members of the public were asked to rank a number of health programmes that differed in the distribution of benefits and final outcomes in ways that enabled us to distinguish between different types of egalitarianism. The results suggest that outcome egalitarianism dominates, particularly for differences in health by social class, but a sizeable minority of respondents appear to be gain egalitarians, especially when the health differences are by sex. These results have important implications for how we think about outcome-based social welfare functions in economics. AcknowledgementsWe would like to thank

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“…Recently in this journal Abasolo and Tsuchiya (2004) (henceforth AT) argued that the HRSWF need not satisfy the monotonicity property (also know as the Pareto criteria) if the HRSWF is made averse to health inequality to the full extent. They propose a new HRSWF which violates monotonicity but seemingly is better at accounting for inequality.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

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In a recent paper in this journal Abasolo and Tsuchiya [Abasolo, I., Tsuchiya, A., 2004. Exploring social welfare functions and violation of monotonicity: an example from inequalities in health.

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confidence: 99%