Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Why Relative Economic Position Does Not Matter: A Cost Benenit Analysis, Thomas J. Kniesner, W. Kip Viscusi

Center for Policy Research

The current debate over cost-benefit concerns in agencies’ evaluations of government regulations is not so much whether to consider costs and benefits at all but rather what belongs in the estimated costs and benefits. Overlaid is the long-standing belief that the distribution of costs and benefits needs some consideration in policy evaluations. In a recent article in the University of Chicago Law Review, Robert Frank and Cass Sunstein proposed a relatively simple method for adding distributional concerns to policy evaluation that enlarges the typically constructed estimates of the individual’s willingness to pay for safer jobs or safer products. One might …