Politicians, CEOs and various other types of dictators make social choices that influence both their own and others' welfare. When a dictator's preferred alternative differs from recipients', it is unclear which preferences they aggregate and how they determine this set of admissible...

The FDA sets a uniform hypothesis test's approval standard at the end of Phase III clinical trials for new drugs. We study the impact of flexible approval standards on experimentation and social welfare when pharmaceutical companies (firms) are strategic, especially in terms of the level of...

We use cross-sectional data from 93 countries to study the relationship between how much redistribution citizens of different socioeconomic status want and how much the government actually redistributes. We focus on redistribution because it is an outcome for which there is a natural class...

Consider a setting in which individual strict preferences need to be aggregated into a social strict preference relation. For two alternatives and an odd number of agents, it follows from May’s Theorem that the majority aggregation rule is the only one satisfying anonymity, neutrality, and...

Much economic analysis derives policy recommendations based on social welfare criteria intended to model the preferences of a policy maker. Yet, little is known about policy maker’s normative views in a way amenable to this use. In a behavioral experiment, we elicit German legislators’...

This paper decision-theoretically investigates belief aggregation method which allows consistently updating the aggregate belief.After confirming that the Pareto axiom and dynamic consistency require decision power of an individual to evolve proportionally to how much his/her prior has been...

This paper presents different social preferences and their impact on investors' and firms' decisions within a unified framework. We categorize preferences into three types: deontological, non-consequentialist, and consequentialist. When investors are large, all three preferences influence...

A key solution for public good provision is the voluntary formation of institutions that commit players to cooperate. Such institutions generate inequality if some players decide not to participate but cannot be excluded from cooperation benefits. Prior research with small groups emphasizes the...

When income inequality increases when average income levels increase, rises in average income levels might result in inequality costs. This paper develops marginal social welfare measures that account for the possibility that income inequality changes when average income levels change....

In this paper, we hypothesize that the strength of the consensus effect, i.e., the tendency for people to overweight the prevalence of their own values and preferences when forming beliefs about others' values and preferences, depends on the salience of own preferences. We manipulate salience by...