Professor Aki Tsuchiya Seminar

On 13 December 2024, Professor Aki Tsuchiya from the University of Sheffield gave a talk on a suite of studies aiming to: (1) examine whether public distributional preferences for health satisfy symmetry; (2) explore eliciting symmetric inequality aversion in equivalent income, a preference-based measure of wellbeing; and (3) better understand distributional preferences (i) by examining the reasons for distributional preferences qualitatively through online discussion groups, (ii) by comparing the reasons across the digital divide using telephone interviews of the digitally excluded, and (iii) by administering a large scale unassisted online survey to allow econometric analysis by respondent background etc.

The studies propose two approaches. One is to elicit distributional preferences for socioeconomic inequality in health and to fit the data to an asymmetric Health-Related Social Welfare Function (HRSWF) that accommodates non-symmetric preferences across socioeconomic groups. The other is to elicit distributional preferences for an overall measure of wellbeing that includes health and wealth and to fit the data to asymmetric SWF.