A Bridging Document About Hedonic Loss
| Publication year | 1992 |
| Pages | 277 |
| Citation | Vol. 21 No. 2 Pg. 277 |
1992, February, Pg. 277. A Bridging Document About Hedonic Loss
This article is designed to bridge the gap between some of the "scales" that are employed regularly to evaluate hedonic, or non-economic, loss sustained as a result of physical injury and similar losses that result from emotional trauma. Hedonic loss encompasses those matters subsumed under the concept of "degree of loss of enjoyment of life" cited in reference books concerning hedonic damages.(fn1)
Recent writings on hedonic loss describe several ways of thinking about the old concept of "pain and suffering" from a more objective point of view, with unbiased, measurable outcomes which are finally determined by the trier of fact: either judge or jury.(fn2) There are several steps which are necessary to achieve such a measurable outcome.
The first step involves asking several questions in order to determine how a large number of people think about risk and the acceptable costs of risk avoidance. An example of this process requires the following assumptions: The typical cost of ridership on a particular public transit system is $1. The risk of some sort of physical injury befalling those who use public transit is one incident per 1,000 exposures to that risk by virtue of time spent riding in public transit vehicles. A sample group of 1,000 riders is asked how much they would be willing to pay (via increased costs) for using the system, in order to reduce the same risk from 1:1000 to 1:10,000.
If data demonstrate that the average rider is willing to pay $1.25 for that added risk protection (allocating $0.25 specifically to reducing that risk), the dollar value assigned to that particular exercise of risk avoidance can be determined statistically. In this case, the dollar value is $0.25 x the total number of riders in the system.
Similar questions can be used to address a host of other issues, including "What would you pay not to have a certain thing happen to you?" and "How much should be given to the person who has suffered some particular sort of trauma to compensate her because she has, as a direct result of the trauma, been rendered less capable of enjoying her life and its pleasures than she was before the traumatic occurrence?"
The second step involves taking account of the four broad areas of life functioning that may be involved, enquiring into them with particularity and comparing the person's post-injury lifestyle with his or her pre-injury lifestyle. The four broad areas are:
1) Practical functioning---the extent to which a person's activity in daily living has been affected. Included in this area are any activities a person typically engages in as an integral part of daily life, such as reading, grooming, dressing, eating, sleeping, shopping, traveling, doing housework and parenting.
2) Emotional and psychological functioning---a person's ability to live on a daily basis free of any debilitating emotional problems...
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