The Discipline of Cost‐Benefit Analysis
By Amartya Sen. The Journal of Legal Studies, 2000
289 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Cost‐benefit analysis is a general discipline, based on the use of some foundational principles, which are not altogether controversial, but have nevertheless considered plausibility. Divisiveness increases as various additional requirements are imposed. There is a trade‐off here between easier usability (through locked‐up formulae) and more general acceptability (through allowing parametric variations). The paper examines and scrutinizes the merits and demerits of these additional requirements. The particular variant of cost‐benefit approach that is most commonly used now is, in fact, extraordinarily limited, because of its insistence on doing the valuation entirely through an analogy with the market mechanism. This admits only a narrow class of values, and demands that individuals be unconcerned about many substantial variations, ignored in the procedure of market valuation. The use, instead, of a general social choice approach can allow greater freedom of valuation and can also accommodate more informational inputs.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b9d6f50d2c894ed3c5df6fe2a5aba298cc171f47
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In Economics and Econometrics
Citations in the corpus
- Green economy and related concepts: An overview (2016, unknown): “Cost-benefit analysis (CBA) is a decision support tool used to assess the welfare effects of a project or an investment and has its roots in the welfare measures of producer and consumer surplus (Hanley and Barbier, 2009; Hanley and Spash, 1993; Hansjürgens, 2004; Sen, 2000).”
- The Human Development Index: A History (2007, background): “Sen (2000a) views Benthamite utilitarianism as a rhetorical tactic that successfully cleared the intellectual arena of any serious opponents to utility.”
- Cost-benefit analysis in the context of ecosystem services for human well-being: A multidisciplinary critique (2011, background): “As discussed above, the distribution of wealth in society influences how prices are determined, so that the preferences of wealthier groups tend to be disproportionately represented in economic valuations (Bromley, 1991; Sen, 2000; Spash, 2008).”