Academic research is a public good whose production is supported by the tuition-paying students that a faculty's research accomplishments attract. A professor's spot contribution to the university's revenues thus depends not on her spot research production, but rather on her cumulative research...

Some social choice models assume that precise interpersonal comparisons of utility (either ordinal or cardinal) are possible, allowing a rich theory of distributive justice. Other models assume that absolutely no interpersonal comparisons are possible, or even meaningful; hence all...

Some social choice models assume that precise interpersonal comparisons of utility (either ordinal or cardinal) are possible, allowing a rich theory of distributive justice. Other models assume that absolutely no interpersonal comparisons are possible, or even meaningful; hence all...

`Judgement aggregation' is a model of social choice where the space of social alternatives is the set of consistent truth-valuations (`judgements') on a family of logically interconnected propositions. It is well-known that propositionwise majority voting can yield logically inconsistent...

We develop a model of social choice over lotteries, where people's psychological characteristics are mutable, their preferences may be incomplete, and approximate interpersonal comparisons of well-being are possible. Formally, we suppose individual preferences are described by a...

We propose a mathematical model of `approximate' interpersonal comparisons of well-being, in terms of an incomplete preorder over a space of `psychophysical states'. We argue that this model is consistent with people's intuitions about interpersonal comparisons, intertemporal preferences, and...

We develop a model of preference aggregation where people's psychological characteristics are mutable (hence, potential objects of individual or social choice), their preferences may be incomplete, and approximate interpersonal comparisons of well-being are possible. Formally, we consider...

Given a bargaining problem, the `relative utilitarian' (RU) solution maximizes the sum total of the bargainer's utilities, after having first renormalized each utility function to range from zero to one. We show that RU is `optimal' in two very different senses. First, RU is the maximal element...

`Judgement aggregation' is a model of social choice where the space of social alternatives is the set of consistent truth-valuations (`judgements') on a family of logically interconnected propositions. It is well-known that propositionwise majority voting can yield logically inconsistent...

Let X be a set of states, and let I be an infinite indexing set. Our first main result states that any separable, permutation-invariant preference order () on X^I admits an additive representation. That is: there exists a linearly ordered abelian group A and a `utility function' u:X--A such...