Consider the following principle regarding the performance of collective choice rules. "If a rule selects alternative x in situation 1, and alternative y in situation 2, there must be an alternative z, and some member of society whose appreciation of z relative to x has increased when going from...

We systematically examine the acute impact of exposure to a public health crisis on multiple dimensions of economic decision making and social preferences using unique experimental panel data collected just before and immediately after the outbreak of COVID-19 in China. Exploiting the...

The public at large, many policymakers, and some economists hold views of social welfare that attach some importance to factors other than individuals' utilities. This note shows that any such non-individualistic notion of social welfare conflicts with the Pareto principle

We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity. This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May's Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on...

In this paper, we propose a new measure of horizontal equity that overcomes many of the shortcomings of previous proposed measures. Our starting point is the observation that a well-behaved social welfare function need not evaluate global' (vertical equity) differences in after-tax income using...

We conduct a framed field experiment in Mindoro, Philippines on ecological altruism. Behavioral differences between ethnic groups in Mindoro, the Tagalogs and the Mangyans, were investigated. We design a two-part donation task (i.e. dictator game) where the recipient of the donation is a local...

We study the interplay between intragenerational and intergenerational equity in an economy with two countries producing and consuming from national capital stocks. We characterize the sustainable development path that a social planner would implement to achieve intertemporal egalitarianism. If...

This paper introduces excluding outlier voters (EOV) as a general mechanism for revealing true preferences in social choices, and for discouraging voters from strategic voting and manipula-tion. This mechanism is general in that it can be implemented with any voting system. The paper...

We consider strategy-proof rules operating on a rich domain of preference profiles in a set up where multiple private goods have to be assigned to a set of agents with entitlements where preferences display satiation. We show that if the rule is in addition "desirable", in that it is tops-only,...

In an influential paper, Kaplow and Shavell (Journal of Political Economy, 2001) propose and prove a proposition that “Any non-welfarist method of policy assessment violates the Pareto principle.” In this paper, I first make a counter example to prove that their proposition is false. I also...