Evaluating Risky Prospects: The Distribution View

Luc Bovens (LSE) gives a talk at the 6th Munich-Sydney-Tilburg Conference on "Models and Decisions" (10-12 April, 2013) titled "Evaluating Risky Prospects: The Distribution View". Abstract: Policy Analysts need to rank policies with risky outcomes. Such policies can be thought off as prospects. A prospect is a matrix of utilities. On the rows we list the people who are affected by the policy. In the columns we list alternative states of the world and specify a probability distribution over the states. I provide a taxonomy of various ex ante and ex post distributional concerns that enter into such policy evaluations and construct a general method that reflects these concerns, integrates the ex ante and ex post calculus, and generates orderings over policies. I show that Parfit’s Priority View is a special case of the Distribution View.