Preferences for equity in health behind a veil of ignorance

Individual attitudes to distributions of life years between two groups in a society are explored by means of an experiment. Subjects are asked to place themselves behind a veil of ignorance which is specified in terms of risk (known probabilities) for some subjects and in terms of uncertainty (unknown probabilities) for some subjects. The latter is argued to be the appropriate interpretation of Rawls’ notion. It is found that subjects exhibit convex preferences over life years for the two groups, and that preferences do not differ between the risk and the uncertainty specifications.