Justifying social discounting: The rank-discounted utilitarian approach

Zuber, Stéphane; Asheim, Geir B.

doi:10.1016/j.jet.2011.08.001

Cited by 104 publications

(69 citation statements)

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“…This is the case of the discounting literature (Nordhaus, 2007;Stern, 2007) and of the utility streams literature (Diamond, 1965;Svensson, 1980;Basu and Mitra, 2003;Zuber and Asheim, 2012). 21 In such frameworks, it is natural to call egalitarian each allocation for which well-being is equalized among generations.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intergenerational egalitarianism

Piacquadio

2014

Journal of Economic Theory

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Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Distributional equity deeply conflicts with the Pareto principle: efficient allocations cannot guarantee that i) each generation be assigned a consumption bundle that is at least as large as an arbitrarily small fraction of the bundle assigned to any other generation and that ii) each generation finds its assigned bundle at least as desirable as an arbitrarily small fraction of the bundle assigned to any other generation with same preferences. Overcoming such tension unveils a new ethical dilemma for intergenerational equity: the short-term/long-term inequality trade-off. The egalitarian ethical observer can choose between: i) "weak equity" among all generations (at the cost of possibly large inequalities among proximate ones) and ii) "strong equity" among few successive generations (at the cost of possibly large inequalities among distant ones). The last alternative is specific to the dynamic framework and provides a rationale to treat generations differently based on their time order. Terms of use: Documents in

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Intergenerational egalitarianism

Piacquadio

2014

Journal of Economic Theory

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“…Therefore, it will be of great interest to apply the SDU criterion (or a similar criterion extended rank-discounted utilitarianism proposed by Zuber and Asheim, 2010) for evaluating climate change in models where eects are disaggregated on groups, and compare DU to alternative criteria in such a setting. We will turn to this in future work.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate policy under sustainable discounted utilitarianism

Dietz

Asheim

2012

Journal of Environmental Economics and Management

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“…Portney and Weyant (1999) brings together a number of contributions-along with replies to them-by leading economists exploring the role of risk, time consistency, the role of market prices, and hyperbolic discounting in pinning down the discount rate. More recently, Zuber and Asheim (2012) propose a criterion that avoids the implication of prejudice against the future implicit in a positive pure rate of time preference. Heal and Millner (2013) take a political economy approach to establish an aggregate discount rate that is representative of a population in which a range of discount rates are represented.…”

Section: T+1mentioning

confidence: 99%

Climate change and the re-evaluation of cost-benefit analysis

Dennig

2017

Climatic Change

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The evaluation of climate policy has emerged as an important application of cost-benefit analysis (CBA). But the tool, as it had been most widely used previously, was not suited for this problem. Spatially, the effects of climate change transcend national boundaries and, temporally, they transcend generational time scales. CBA, in its standard form, relies on assumptions that are not fully appropriate in this context. In this essay, I discuss the shortcomings of CBA framed by its historical development and argue that its relatively recent application to climate change has contributed to growth in the literature re-evaluating its normative foundations. In relation to discounting, recent innovations emphasise aspects such as the aggregation of a multiplicity of time preferences and the distinction between inter-and intra-generational time preferences, which lead to discounting approaches that differ from the standard approach with the Ramsey equation. In relation to spatial equity, much of the recent literature argues for the use of equity weights to account for impacts on different income groups. These are significant changes relative to the orthodoxy in the field before the emergence of climate change.

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Justifying social discounting: The rank-discounted utilitarian approach

Cited by 104 publications

References 50 publications

Intergenerational egalitarianism

Intergenerational egalitarianism

Climate policy under sustainable discounted utilitarianism

Climate change and the re-evaluation of cost-benefit analysis

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