Valuing Consumer Safety.* Professor David J Ball, School of Health, Biological and Environmental Sciences, Middlesex University, 10 Highgate Hill, London N19 5ND, telephone/fax +44 1603 665422, D.Ball@mdx.ac.uk or david.ball@paston.co.uk
Consumer safety is a major and growing issue, particularly in respect of the numbers of fatal and non-fatal injuries in this sector which considerably outweigh those in the occupational sphere and can even exceed those resulting from road traffic accidents, and which are likely to increase due to demographic changes in Europe.
Consumer policy decision makers have, however, to allocate resources in a way which recognises both the costs and benefits of risk reduction measures. One piece of guidance which could help decision makers in this respect is to have access to a monetary value for consumer safety which would serve as a measure for gauging the reasonableness of safety interventions.
This paper will describe an approach to valuing consumer safety which is designed with the needs of the decision maker in mind. The approach takes account of uncertainty in the value of safety, the need for credibility and plausibility with a diversity of stakeholders, and the overall complexity of decision making in the consumer sphere.
*This work was sponsored by the Consumer Safety Unit of the UK Department of Trade and Industry. The views expressed will be those of the author.
Go to . . .
1998 SRA-Europe Table of Contents
1998 SRA-Europe Author Index
Main Abstracts Menu Page
RiskWorld Home Page