The standard ad hoc monetary objective function creates a bias in favor of inflation targeting. Instead, this paper uses the Pareto criterion to assess inflation targeting (IT), price-level targeting (PLT), and nominal-income targeting (NIT). The effect that unanticipated inflation or deflation...

In a pure-exchange economy involving one perishable consumption good and risk-averse consumers, the elasticity of a consumer’s Pareto-efficient consumption with respect to aggregate output equals the reciprocal of the ratio of the consumer’s coefficient of relative risk aversion to average...

We study the optimal provision of public goods in the context of a special class of altruistically linked utility functions. We show that the usual Samuelson condition holds as if the utility functions were independent.

The paper focuses on efficiency under monopoly. Contrary to common wisdom, nine examples given in the paper show that a Pareto-efficient output in monopoly is possible under both linear and nonlinear pricing. Pareto efficiency can be achieved when consumers are homogeneous as well as...

We analyze nonlinear pricing problem under monopoly using two hidden types of agents with linear demands and fully characterize all possible optimal solutions for both ordered and non-ordered demands. We show that both optimal packages can either contain Pareto-efficient quantities or one...