We present a restriction on the domain of individual preferences that is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of a social choice rule that is continuous, anonymous, and respects unanimity. The restriction is that the space of preferences be contractible. Contractibility admits a...

This paper revisits the aggregation theorem of Chichilnisky (1980), replacing the original smooth topology by the closed convergence topology and responding to several comments (N. Baigent (1984, 1985, 1987, 1989), N. Baigent and P. Huang (1990) and M. LeBreton and J. Uriarte (1900 a, b)....

Subjective well-being has been proposed as an alternative to preference based values of health benefit for use in economic evaluation. We develop a latent factor model of health and well-being in order to compare reported satisfaction with life, satisfaction with health and SF-6D responses....

Behaviourism is the view that preferences, beliefs, and other mental states in social-scienti�c theories are auxiliary constructs re-describing people's behav- ioural dispositions. Mentalism is the view that they capture real phenomena, no less existent than the unobservable entities and...

The year 2012 was the 30th anniversary of William H. Riker’s modern classic Liberalism against populism (1982) and is marked by the present special issue. In this introduction, we seek to identify some core elements and evaluate the current status of the Rikerian research program and its...

Social health insurance systems can be designed with different levels of state involvement and varying degrees of redistribution. In this article we focus on citizens’ preferences regarding the design of their health insurance coverage including the extent of redistribution. Using a...

The sustainability of the welfare state ultimately depends on citizens' preferences for income redistribution. They are elicited through a Discrete Choice Experiment performed in 2008 in Switzerland. Attributes are redistribution as GDP share, its uses (the unemployed, old-age pensioners, people...

Background and purpose Health-related quality of life is an important issue in the treatment of breast cancer, and health-state utilities are essential for cost-utility analysis. This paper identifies and summarises published utilities for common health-related quality of life outcomes for...

Morris (1996, 1997) introduced preference-based definitions of knowledge of belief in standard state-space structures. This paper extends this preference-based approach to unawareness structures (Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper, 2006, 2008). By defining unawareness and knowledge in terms of...

A standard two-sector sticky price model with flexibly priced durables depicts negative co-movement between durables and non-durables after a monetary policy shock, which is at odds with the empirical evidence. This paper proposes a new channel, non-separable preferences with a small wealth...