Fleurbaey, Marc
[Princeton University]
Leroux, Marie-Louise
[Université du Québec à Montréal]
Ponthiere, Gregory
[Paris School of Economics]
An early death is, undoubtedly, a serious disadvantage. However, the compensation of short-lived individuals has remained so far largely unexplored, probably because it appears infeasible. Indeed, short-lived agents can hardly be identified ex ante, and cannot be compensated ex post. We argue that, despite those difficulties, a compensation can be carried out by encouraging early consumption in the life cycle. In a model with heterogeneous preferences and longevities, we show how a specific social criterion can be derived from intuitive principles, and we study the corresponding optimal policy under various informational assumptions
Bibliographic reference |
Fleurbaey, Marc ; Leroux, Marie-Louise ; Ponthiere, Gregory. Compensating the dead. In: Journal of Mathematical Economics, Vol. 51, p. 28-41 (2014) |
Permanent URL |
http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/146873 |