Behavioral economics has so far largely avoided discussing the psychological origins of preferences, as well as their relation to needs. This has not only restricted interdisciplinary exchange, but also significantly limits the predictive capabilities of models. For example, the revealed...

The crises of both the climate and the biosphere are manifestations of the imbalance between human extractive, and polluting activities and the Earth's regenerative capacity. Planetary boundaries define limits for biophysical systems and processes that regulate the stability and life support...

We reappraise the Arrow problem by studying the aggregation of choice functions. We do so in the general framework of judgment aggregation, in which choice functions are naturally representable by specifying, for each menu A and each alternative x in A, whether x is choosable from A, or not. Our...

This paper examines paternalistic preferences in large-scale experiments in the U.S. Participants decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, mistaken about their options, to make a choice that is misaligned with their preferences. We find that the willingness to intervene strongly...

This paper contrasts two kinds of political economy, represented by welfare economics and social choice theory on the one hand and James M. Buchanan's constitutional political economy on the other hand. It posits that the difference between the two kinds has its roots in the different normative...

We establish the Subgradient Theorem for monotone correspondences -- a monotone correspondence is equal to the subdifferential of a potential if and only if it is conservative, i.e. its integral along a closed path vanishes irrespective of the selection from the correspondence along the path. We...

Why is in-kind aid a prominent feature of welfare systems? We present a lab-in-the-field experiment involving members of the general U.S. population and SNAP recipients. After documenting a widespread desire to limit recipients’ choices, we quantify the relative importance of (i) welfarist...

We propose a method for cost-benefit analysis of public policies that identifies potential Pareto improvements when losers from a reform are compensated through income tax changes. Reforms are desirable when they decrease aggregate excess burden in commodity and labor markets. This condition is...

Despite crowdfunding platforms' growing involvement in financing welfare, related ethical issues have received little scholarly attention. To address this gap, we focus on GoFundMe, the leading welfare crowdfunding platform in the US, to examine whether it facilitates the establishment of a just...

This report estimates the "social rate of time preference" (SRTP) for New Zealand public policy appraisal using a Ramsey equation. It uses the Weitzman (1998) method to derive a declining discount rate schedule of 2% (real) for years 1-30, 1.5% for years 31-100, and 1% for years 101 on. The...

In welfare economics, the theory of second best is inextricably linked to an article by Richard George Lipsey and Kelvin John Lancaster, published in 1956 in the Review of Economic Studies. The publication of this article was encouraged by Harry Gordon Johnson, who was a member of the journal's...

This study explores the way in which social information about giving impacts the stability of distributional preferences. We designed a two-stage treatment which varied the information participants received about the maximum amounts given to recipients. Information on maximum giving can...

This paper proposes a conceptual model of decision-making tying specific preferences to broader individual goals. In particular, the model considers two hierarchically ordered types of goals: Terminal goals, which represent fundamental objectives (e.g., health, social connection, etc.), and...

Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of utilities that render a given allocation Pareto optimal. We...

This paper characterizes a novel class of welfare criteria for settings with endogenous population. The core innovation is to treat parents’ fertility preferences as ethically relevant, deferring to them on the quality--quantity trade-off under conditions of equality. The resulting family of...

We review the evolution of the concept of utility in economics, addressing the conceptual and terminological fragmentation that characterises the interdisciplinary debate. This study adopts the scoping review framework to systematically analyse the main theoretical approaches, ranging from...