Preferences for life-expectancy gains: Sooner or later?

We assess individuals’ preferences for time paths of reductions in mortality risk yielding a life-expectancy gain of about 1 month. In a survey of more than 1000 French residents, we find substantial coherence and heterogeneity. We elicit pairwise preferences between three perturbations of age- and gender-specific survival curves: transient (reduce hazard for next 10 years), additive (reduce hazard in all future years by subtracting a constant), and proportional (reduce hazard in all future years by a common fraction). The preference order implied by these pairwise responses is transitive for 85% of respondents. The most common preference orders, accounting for more than half the respondents, are strict indifference, proportional ≻ additive ≻ transient, and the inverse of that ranking. These are consistent with globally risk-neutral, risk-seeking, and risk-averse preferences toward longevity, respectively. Choices between one of these scenarios and a latent version that provides no risk reduction for the first 10 or 20 years are consistent with these risk postures. The mean and median consumption-discount rates are 12 and 5% per year, respectively, and the average coefficient of relative risk aversion with respect to financial gambles is about 0.5. Preferences toward the time path of mortality-risk reduction are not strongly associated with individual characteristics, although respondents who are older or exhibit higher consumption-discount rates tend to exhibit less longevity-risk aversion. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media New York 2015