Researchers cannot definitively interpret what the framers of the United States Constitution had in mind when they wrote of the general Welfare. Nevertheless, welfare economics can contribute to policy choice in democracies. Specifying social welfare functions enables coherent analysis, by...

Participants in prediction markets such as the Iowa Electronic Markets trade all-or-nothing contracts that pay a dollar if and only if specified future events occur. Researchers engaged in empirical study of prediction markets have argued broadly that equilibrium prices of the contracts traded...

This paper studies the ecological inference problem that arises when clinicians seek to personalize patient care by making health risk assessments conditional on observed patient attributes. Let y be a patient outcome of interest and let (x = k, w = j) be patient attributes that a clinician...

Social interactions make communicable disease a core concern of public health policy. A prevalent problem is scarcity of empirical evidence that are informative about how interventions affect population behavior and illness. Randomized trials, which have been important to evaluation of...

Federal statistical agencies in the United States and analogous agencies elsewhere commonly report official economic statistics as point estimates, without accompanying measures of error. Users of the statistics may incorrectly view them as error-free or may incorrectly conjecture error...

Attempting to shed light on the optimal size of government, economists have analyzed planning problems that specify a set of feasible taxation-spending policies and a social welfare function. The analysis characterizes the optimal policy choice of a planner who knows the welfare achieved by each...

The merits of alternative income tax policies depend on the population distribution of preferences for income, leisure, and public goods. Standard theory, which supposes that persons want more income and more leisure, does not predict how they resolve the tension between these desires. Empirical...

Analyses of public policy regularly express certitude about the consequences of alternative policy choices. Yet policy predictions often are fragile, with conclusions resting on critical unsupported assumptions. Then the certitude of policy analysis is not credible. This paper develops a...

Research on collective provision of private goods has focused on distributional considerations. This paper studies a class of problems of decision under uncertainty in which the argument for collective choice emerges from the mathematics of aggregating individual payoffs. Consider decision...

This paper concerns the prescriptive function of decision analysis. I suppose that an agent must choose an action yielding welfare that varies with the state of nature. The agent has a welfare function and beliefs, but he does not know the actual state of nature. It is often argued that such an...