While research on subjective well-being abounds, comparatively little thought has been given to its practical policy implications. Two approaches to derive policy advice have emerged in the literature: One is organized in terms of the idea to maximize a hedonic social welfare function, the other...

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, every Pareto efficient and non-dictatorial method of aggregating utility functions must be time-inconsistent. We also show that decisions...

Many consumers care about climate change and other externalities associated with their purchases. We analyze the behavior and market effects of such "socially responsible consumers" in three parts. First, we develop a flexible theoretical framework to study competitive equilibria with rational...

In addition to his role as a consumer pursuing his own interests, an individual may also regard himself as an ethical observer or citizen, judging matters from society's point of view. However, an individual's personal preferences do not necessarily coincide with his social preferences. This...

In this paper we are concerned with the following question. Given an extended preference ordering under what conditions does there exist an empirical stochastic/social choice function which generates it? We use Farkas' lemma to obtain a necessary and sufficient condition under which such a...

Social demand functions result from the budget constrained maximization of "social preferences" or "other regarding preferences." These preferences are non-selfish in the sense that they also depend on other consumers' wealth. This paper addresses the robustness to wealth externalities of the...

We report the results of a combination of a dictator experiment with either a “social planner” or a “veil of ignorance” experiment. The experimental design and the analysis of the data are based on the theoretical framework proposed in the companion paper by Becker, Häger, and Heufer...

We provide a framework to decompose preferences into a notion of distributive justice and a selfishness part and to recover individual notions of distributive justice from data collected in appropriately designed experiments. “Dictator games” with varying transfer rates used in Andreoni and...

We report the results of a combination of a dictator experiment with either a "social planner" or a "veil of ignorance" experiment. The experimental design and the analysis of the data are based on the theoretical framework proposed in the companion paper by Becker, Häger, and Heufer (BHH,...