"Fair intergenerational decision making"

Abstract.
Most analyses of climate policy rely on an expected discounted utilitarian criterion, ignoring the questions of welfare measurement, preference diversity and preference change. This paper develops alternative methods for policy evaluation, named fair ex ante and fair ex post approaches, that explicitly address these issues. These approaches measure wellbeing in terms of equivalent income, they incorporate fairness ideals by relying on a Pigou-Dalton transfer principle and they are able to disentangle inequality aversion from risk aversion. We model uncertainty about future generations’ preferences as an uncertainty about the identity of future people.