Matthew Adler

About

Matthew Adler is the Richard A. Horvitz Professor of Law and Professor of Economics, Philosophy and Public Policy at Duke University. He is also the founding director of the Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public Policy. His scholarship is interdisciplinary, drawing from welfare economics, normative ethics, and legal theory. Adler’s current research focuses on prioritarianism, a refinement to utilitarianism that gives extra weight to the worse off. He writes about the theoretical foundations of prioritarianism, its implementation as a policy analysis methodology through social welfare functions or cost-benefit analysis with distributional weights, and its application across various policy domains including climate change, risk regulation, and health policy. Adler has authored numerous articles and several monographs, including 'New Foundations of Cost-Benefit Analysis,' 'Well-Being and Fair Distribution: Beyond Cost-Benefit Analysis,' and 'Measuring Social Welfare: An Introduction.' He co-edited the Oxford Handbook of Well-Being and Public Policy and co-founded the Prioritarianism in Practice Research Network. Prior to joining Duke Law in 2012, he was the Leon Meltzer Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law and has held visiting positions at several universities. Adler holds a B.A. and J.D. from Yale University, an M. Litt. in modern history from Oxford University, and has clerked for Judge Harry Edwards and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day…

Research topics

• Economics
• Medicine
• Computer Science
• Political Science
• Public economics
• Demography
• Law and economics
• Demographic economics
• Mathematics
• Pathology

Selected publications

• Prioritarianism in Practice

  Cambridge University Press eBooks · 2022 · 47 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  Prioritarianism is an ethical theory that gives extra weight to the well-being of the worse off. In contrast, dominant policy-evaluation methodologies, such as benefit-cost analysis, cost-effectiveness analysis, and utilitarianism, ignore or downplay issues of fair distribution. Based on a research group founded by the editors, this important book is the first to show how prioritarianism can be used to assess governmental policies and evaluate societal conditions. This book uses prioritarianism…

  DOI

• Fair innings? The utilitarian and prioritarian value of risk reduction over a whole lifetime

  Journal of Health Economics · 2020 · 45 citations

  1st authorCorresponding

  The social value of risk reduction (SVRR) is the marginal social value of reducing an individual's fatality risk, as measured by some social welfare function (SWF). This Article investigates SVRR, using a lifetime utility model in which individuals are differentiated by age, lifetime income profile, and lifetime risk profile. We consider both the utilitarian SWF and a "prioritarian" SWF, which applies a strictly increasing and strictly concave transformation to individual utility. We show that t…

  DOI

• Association between age at disease onset of anti-neutrophil cytoplasmic antibody–associated vasculitis and clinical presentation and short-term outcomes

  Lara D. Veeken · 2020 · 39 citations

  OBJECTIVES: ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV) can affect all age groups. We aimed to show that differences in disease presentation and 6 month outcome between younger- and older-onset patients are still incompletely understood. METHODS: We included patients enrolled in the Diagnostic and Classification Criteria for Primary Systemic Vasculitis (DCVAS) study between October 2010 and January 2017 with a diagnosis of AAV. We divided the population according to age at diagnosis: <65 years or ≥65 years…

  DOI

• How to Balance Lives and Livelihoods in a Pandemic

  2023-04-20 · 7 citations

  book-chapterOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Abstract The COVID-19 crisis and the policy responses to it have impacted many different areas of common concern including public health and the economy. This raises difficult questions about how to balance these concerns in making policy decisions. In this chapter, we review a number of tools that welfare economics offers for conceptualizing and studying such trade-offs. We argue that social welfare analysis is the most useful method for doing so. We show how concerns for the distributive and o…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• “Better the devil you know”: Are stated preferences over health and happiness determined by how healthy and happy people are?

  Social Science & Medicine · 2022-05-10 · 7 citations

  article1st author
  PublisherDOI

Frequent coauthors

• Eric A. Posner

  36 shared

• James K. Hammitt

  Harvard University

  23 shared

• Maddalena Ferranna

  18 shared

• Nicolas Treich

  Toulouse School of Economics

  17 shared

• Chris Fleming

  University of California, Merced

  16 shared

• Akira Mizuta Lippit

  16 shared

• Bradley Youngs- Ton

  Western Sydney University

  16 shared

• Dimitris Vardoulakis

  16 shared

Labs

• Duke Center for Law, Economics and Public PolicyPI

Education

• Ph.D., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1995

• M.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1991

• B.A., Economics

  University of California, Berkeley

  1988

Similar researchers at Duke University

• Sarah C. W. Bakerh-25
• Kerry Abramsh-8