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...

Varian (1988) showed that the utility maximization hypothesis cannot be falsified when only a subset of goods is observed. We show that this result does not hold under the assumptions that unobserved prices and expenditures remain constant. These assumptions are naturally satisfied in laboratory...

Varian (1988) showed that the utility maximization hypothesis cannot be falsified when only a subset of goods is observed. We show that this result does not hold under the assumptions that unobserved prices and expenditures remain constant. These assumptions are naturally satisfied in laboratory...