We conduct an analysis of the “efficiency gap” using tools from economic theory and find serious flaws in the measure. In particular, we show that the efficiency gap contains an peculiar form of cost benefit analysis which is hard to defend, that the recommendations for the use of the...

We investigate a normative theory of incomplete preferences in the context of preliminary screening procedures. We introduce a theory of ranking in the presence of objectively incomparable marginal contributions (apples and oranges). Our theory recommends benchmarking, a method under which an...

We investigate the results of Kreps (1979), dropping his completeness axiom. As an added generalization, we work on arbitrary lattices, rather than a lattice of sets. We show that one of the properties of Kreps is intimately tied with representation via a closure operator. That is, a preference...

We introduce the first family of district compactness measures that can incorporate a wide range of internal geographic features. The measures in this family are the probability that a district contains an admissible path between a randomly selected pair of people. The measure can account for...

A planner wants to elicit information about an agent's preference relation, but not the entire ordering. Specifically, preferences are grouped into "types", and the planner only wants to elicit the agent's type. We first assume beliefs about randomization are subjective, and show that a space of...

We propose an abstract method of systematically assigning a "rational"' ranking to non-rationalizable choice data. We define an individual welfare functional as a mapping from stochastic choice functions into weak orders. A stochastic choice function (or choice distribution) gives the empirical...