The authors exhibit an efficient auction (i.e., an auction that maximizes expected surplus conditional on all private and public information). In the case of private value, it is well-known that the Vickrey auction (for one good) or its Groves-Clark extension (for multiple goods) is efficient in...

This paper takes an information-theoretic approach to the economics of science, extending Arrow's pioneering (1962) analysis of the allocation of resources for industrial research and invention. It addresses the questions: is there a valid economic distinction between scientific and...

This paper is about net national product (NNP). The authors are concerned with what NNP means, what it should include, what it offers us and, therefore, why we may be interested in it. They show that NNP, properly defined, can be used as a gauge for project evaluation, but they also show that it...

This paper is about measuring social well-being and evaluating policy. Section 1 concerns the links between the two, while Sections 2 and 3, respectively, are devoted to the development of appropriate methods for measuring and evaluating. In Section 2 I identify a minimal set of indices for...

In any dynamic model of the economy with changing population, the latter should properly be one of the state variables of the system. It enters both in the maximand, at least under total utilitarianism, and into the production function in one way or another. If population growth is exponential...

We are interested in three related questions: (1) How should accounting prices be estimated? (2) How should we evaluate policy change in an imperfect economy? (3) How can we check whether intergenerational well-being will be sustained along a projected economic programme? We do not presume that...