The paper examines social welfare of and inequality within a finite homogeneous population consisting of identical individuals. These individuals form groups. All members of a group possess the same income; groups may differ in size and per-capita income. The framework is a generalization of the...

We establish a general relationship between the standard form of the individualistic social-welfare function and the “reduced-form” version that is expressed in terms of inequality and mean income. This shows the relationship between the property of monotonicity and the slope of the...

This paper characterize two preorders over vectors, representing here income distributions, which, for the case of an order-preserving additive welfare function, corresponds the the increasing concave functions which are more concave than ln(x) and than -1/x, respectively. We provide a...

The paper provides a rigorous derivation of the "welfare triangle approximation" (WTA), which is at the center of cost benefit analysis. The result is generalized by showing that the WTA is one of two dual expressions, one of which approximates the change in real consumption, the other the...

Justifications for the use of punitive damages refer to deterrence and punishment. After formulating a social welfare function that incorporates both economic efficiency and a desire for retribution, optimal punitive damages are considered to balance concerns for economic efficiency and for...

For a two-sided multipartner matching model where agents are given by path-independent choice functions and no quota restrictions, Blair [7] had shown that stable matchings always exist and form a lattice. However, the lattice operations were not simple and not distributive. Recently Alkan [3]...