Catastrophic Risk and Egalitarian Principles for Risk Transfer Mechanisms
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Catastrophic Risk and Egalitarian Principles for Risk Transfer Mechanisms
Journal of Contextual Economics – Schmollers Jahrbuch, Vol. 128 (2008), Iss. 4 : pp. 549–560
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Franz E. Prettenthaler, Joanneum Research Forschungsgesellschaft mbH, Institut für Technologie- und Regionalpolitik (InTeReg), Elisabethstraße 20, A-8010 Graz, Austria.
Cited By
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‘Weather Value at Risk’: A uniform approach to describe and compare sectoral income risks from climate change
Prettenthaler, Franz
Köberl, Judith
Bird, David Neil
Science of The Total Environment, Vol. 543 (2016), Iss. P.1010
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scitotenv.2015.04.035 [Citations: 20]
Abstract
Financial aid for the worst off victims of earthquakes and other catastrophes seems tobe a morally unquestioned principle for the allocation of public funds. This paper shows however, that this principle is ambiguous if the decision is viewed as a dynamic choice problem where such resources need to be allocated in two periods: before and after the event takes place (before and after uncertainty is resolved). The literature on social choice suggests that utilitarian principles fare better in such situations. This paper provides a uniform formal framework to relate one such result, namely a multi-profile version of Harsanyis 1955 theorem by Mongin (1994) to another one by Myerson (1981), stated in a somewhat unconventional social choice framework. It shows that the Linearity condition, that is met only by welfare functions of the utilitarian type, has a natural interpretation in terms of an equivalence of ex ante and ex post evaluation, a concept that is related to but not equivalent with dynamic consistency.