A competitive market mechanism is a prominent example of a nonbinary social choice rule, typically defined for a special class of economic environments in which each social state is an economic allocation of private goods, and individuals’ preferences concern only their own personal...

Bargaining results emerge from the interplay of strategic options and social preferences. For every bargaining game, however, the advantage of a player having certain preferences in terms of negotiated equilibrium revenues might differ. We explore the hypothesis that preferences change according...

For two independent principles of intergenerational equity, the implied discount rate equals the growth rate of real per-capital income, say 2%, thus falling right into the range suggested by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget. To prove this, we develop a simple tool to evaluate small...

Optimal policy rules - including those regarding income taxation, commodity taxation, public goods, and externalities - are typically derived in models with homogeneous preferences. This article reconsiders many central results for the case in which preferences for commodities, public goods, and...

This paper derives a basic formula for the measure of social welfare, a second order approximation to the difference of the value of the Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function between the socially optimal resource allocation and the one in the present suboptimal economy. We discuss pros and...

In their recent seminal work, Kaplow and Shavell demonstrate that any metric for policy evaluation that takes into account factors other than individual welfare is Pareto-inefficient; in particular, they argue at length that notions of fairness - insofar as they do not directly contribute to...

This paper studies the possibility of secure implementation (Saijo, T., T. Sjöström, and T. Yamato (2007) "Secure Implementation," Theoretical Economics 2, pp. 203-229) in divisible and non-excludable public good economies with quasi-linear utility functions. Although Saijo, Sjöström, and...

The econometric literature on program-evaluation and optimal treatment-choice takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social-welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities, whereas the utility-based welfare-analysis tradition in public-finance ignores unobserved...

Assuming individual preferences satisfy the Von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms for expected utility we show how we can measure an individual's expected utility of any state using their willingness to accept a gamble over two reference points. The utility function captures the diminishing marginal...

When income inequality increases when average income levels increase, rises in average income levels might result in inequality costs. This paper develops marginal social welfare measures that account for the possibility that income inequality changes when average income levels change....