Altruism and the value of statistical life: empirical implications

In this paper the empirical implications of altruism for cost-benefit analysis of projects involving health changes are investigated. It is shown that a willingness-to-pay question allowing the respondent to state her total willingness to pay (irrespective of what reasons she may have for paying), subject to everybody else paying so as to stay at their initial levels of utility, produces, as a special case, the project evaluation rules derived by Jones-Lee (1991, 1992) and others. The implications of alternative formulations of the valuation question in a contingent valuation study are also explored.