Life and Death Decision Analysis.

Abstract

No assertion can command attention in time of emergency like, 'It's a matter of life and death'. The problem of making decisions that can affect the likelihood of death is one of the most perplexing facing the analyst. As individuals, we are often called upon to make decisions that affect our safety, and other are increasingly making those decisions on our behalf. Yet most present approaches to life and death-decision making concentrate on the value of an individual's life to others rather than to himself. These approaches are both technically and ethically questionable. In this report, we develop a model for an individual who wishes to make life and death decisions on his own behalf or who wishes to delegate them to his agents. We show that an individual can use this model if he is willing to trade between the quality and the quantity of his life. A simplified version requires him to establish preference between the resources he disposes during his lifetime and the length of it, to establish probability assessments on these quantities, to characterize his ability to turn present cash into future income, and to specify his risk attitude. We can use this model to determine both what an individual would have to be paid to assume a given risk and what he would pay to avoid a given risk. The risks may range from those that are virtually infinitesimal to those that are imminently life threatening. We show that this model resolves a paradox posed by previously proposed models. In this model there is no inconsistency between an individual's refusing any amount of money, however large, to incur a large enough risk, and yet being willing to pay only a finite amount, his current wealth, to avoid certain death.

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