Gambles and the Shadow Price of Death
探讨不可分割商品导致的弗里德曼-萨维奇风险偏好，建立赌博需求理论，并应用于劳动力供给模型，分析工资差异如何指导公共风险政策。
Recent papers on the of involve preferences of the sort introduced by Milton Friedman and Leonard Savage (1948).1 Given the choice between undergoing a particular gamble in wealth and possessing the mathematical expectation of the payoffs of the gamble, the consumers in these studies may prefer the gamble. The presence of such risk-loving preferences is inferred from two well-established facts: life is an indivisible commodity in the models, and indivisibility leads to preference for gambles. The former fact is made clear by Philip Cook and Daniel Graham. The latter was first noted by Yew-Kwang Ng (1965) and is widely known. In spite of the obvious connection, the implications of risk-loving tastes in this area have not been explored. This paper examines some implications of such risk loving. The idea that indivisibility produces Friedman-Savage preferences and that such preferences create a demand for gambles is extended in Section I to a theory of demand for indivisible goods and derived demand for associated optimum gambles. This theory suggests that the price of an indivisible good will not compensate for possessing or not possessing the good. Section II applies the demand theory to an equilibrium model of labor supply that is relevant to the determination of the value of life. In this model, the wage diflerential is useful in guiding policy toward public risks, in spite of the fact that the differential is not compensating. I. Demand for Gambles and Demand for Goods