Probability Pricing
Aug 4, 2025
This paper extends traditional cash-flow pricing to analyze the willingness-to-pay for changes in probabilities, that is, probability pricing. We show that an agent’s willingness-to-pay for an arbitrary probability perturbation can be expressed as a cash-flow pricing formula for hypothetical cash flows linked to changes in the survival function. Our cash-flow equivalent formulation provides a way to compute hedging strategies and decompose probability prices into expected payoffs and risk compensation. We extend the analysis to environments with heterogeneous agents and public and private information, characterizing the value of changes in private and public signals. We include four applications that study the valuation of changes in the distribution of aggregate consumption, the efficiency effects of performance noise in principal-agent problems, and the welfare implications of changes in public and private information.