Economists have long studied policy choice by a social planner who aims to maximize welfare in democracies or other political systems where, in some sense, welfare is intended to express the well-being of a society rather than the personal preferences of a dictator. The motivation for studying...

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 an efficiency argument for collective choice emerges from the mathematics of aggregating individual payoffs. Consider...

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1 Utilitarian Treatment of Heterogeneous Populations -- 2 The Selection Problem -- 3 Treatment Using Experimental Data -- 4 The Selection Problem with Sample Data -- References

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...

Should a social planner treat observationally identical persons identically? This paper shows that uniform treatment is not necessarily desirable when a planner has only partial knowledge of treatment response. Then there may be reason to implement a fractional treatment rule, with positive...

The goal of many randomized experiments and quasi-experimental studies in economics is to inform policies that aim to raise incomes and reduce economic inequality. A policy maximizing the sum of individual incomes may not be desirable if it magnifies economic inequality and post-treatment...