Comment: On the Accuracy and Usefulness of Hedonic Loss Estimates

Recently testimony has been put forth in wrongful death cases as to the "value of life." Witnesses offering such testimony base their estimates of life’s value on various risk-tradeoff studies. However, the assumptions underlying the risktradeoff studies are open to question and also seem to be inconsistent with the requisites of standard jury instructions in wrongful death cases. The problems with such studies are made apparent by an examination of the assumptions, the overall study precision, the precision of the risk coefficient and a comparison to standard jury instruction.