| law |
cost-benefit analysis (An approach to public decisionmaking. Quotes below from Sugden and Williams, 1978 p. 236, with some reordering: "Cost-benefit analysis is a 'scientific' technique, or a way of organizing thought which is used to compare alternative social states or courses of action." "Cost-benefit analysis shows how choices should be made so as to pursue some given objective as efficiently as possible." "It has two essential characteristics, consistency and explicitness. Consistency is the principle that decisions between alternatives should be consistent with оbjectives....Cost-benefit analysis is explicit in that it seeks to showXhaX. particular decisions are the logical implications of particular, stated, objectives." "The analyst's skill is his ability to use this technique. He is hired to use this skill on behalf of his client, the decision-maker..... [The analyst] has the right to refuse offers of employment that would require him to use his skills in ways that he believes to be wrong. But to accept the role of analyst is to agree to work with the client's objectives." p. 241: Two functions of cost-benefit analysis: It "assists the decision-maker to pursue objectives that are, by virtue of the community's assent to the decision-making process, social objectives. And by making explicit what these objectives are, it makes the decision-maker more accountable to the community." This view of cost-benefit analysis, unlike the narrower value-free interpretation of the decision-making approach, provides a justification for cost-benefit analysis that is independent of the preferences of the analyst's immediate client An important consequence of this is that the role of the analyst is not completely subservient to that of the decision-maker. Because the analyst has some responsibility of principles over and above those held by the decision-maker, he may have to ask questions that the decision-maker would prefer not to answer, and which expose to debate conflicts of judgement and of interest that might otherwise comfortably have been concealed."  econterms.com Alexander Demidov) |
