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Personal Goods, Efficiency And The Law

Author

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  • Dan Usher

    (Department of Economics, Queen's University)

Abstract

Personal goods, such as leisure and life expectancy, have no unique market price which is the same for everybody. When personal goods are arguments in the utility fucntion and when everybody's utility function is the same, the valuation of personal goods is higher for rich people than for poor people. Thus, rigidly applied in cost-benefit analysis or in the design of the law, the efficiency criterion places a higher value upon the life of a rich person than upon the life of a poor person.

Suggested Citation

  • Dan Usher, 1999. "Personal Goods, Efficiency And The Law," Working Paper 985, Economics Department, Queen's University.
    • Handle: RePEc:qed:wpaper:985
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Arlen, Jennifer H, 1992. "Should Defendants' Wealth Matter?," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 21(2), pages 413-429, June.
    2. R. H. Coase, 2013. "The Problem of Social Cost," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 56(4), pages 837-877.
    3. A. Mitchell Polinsky & Yeon-Koo Che, 1991. "Decoupling Liability: Optimal Incentives for Care and Litigation," RAND Journal of Economics, The RAND Corporation, vol. 22(4), pages 562-570, Winter.
    4. Miceli, Thomas J & Segerson, Kathleen, 1995. "Defining Efficient Care: The Role of Income Distribution," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 24(1), pages 189-208, January.
    5. Kaplow, Louis & Shavell, Steven, 1994. "Why the Legal System Is Less Efficient Than the Income Tax in Redistributing Income," The Journal of Legal Studies, University of Chicago Press, vol. 23(2), pages 667-681, June.
    6. Paul A. Samuelson, 1950. "Evaluation Of Real National Income," Oxford Economic Papers, Oxford University Press, vol. 2(1), pages 1-29.
    7. Viscusi, W Kip, 1999. "The Governmental Composition of the Insurance Costs of Smoking," Journal of Law and Economics, University of Chicago Press, vol. 42(2), pages 575-609, October.
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    Cited by:

    1. Liqun Liu, 2004. "Comorbidities and the willingness to pay for reducing the risk of a targeted disease: introducing endogenous effort for risk reduction," Health Economics, John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., vol. 13(5), pages 493-498, May.
    2. Olof Johansson-Stenman, 2005. "Distributional Weights in Cost-Benefit Analysis—Should We Forget about Them?," Land Economics, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 81(3).

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    More about this item

    Keywords

    Efficiency; Law; Life Expectancy;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • B4 - Schools of Economic Thought and Methodology - - Economic Methodology
    • K1 - Law and Economics - - Basic Areas of Law

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