Zentraler Gegenstand der Wohlfahrtsökonomie ist die Untersuchung geeigneter Kriterien für die Bewertung ökonomischer Zustände nach dem Maßstab von «besser» oder «schlechter». Die Wohlfahrtsökonomie steht damit im Spannungsfeld der in jüngerer Zeit wieder verstärkt diskutierten...

Christmas is when people are expected to act selflessly for the well-being of others, but are people actually more altruistic at this time of the year? Responding to this question poses a challenge because of the confounding factors of charitable tax breaks, reciprocity motives, direct social...

One focus of the G20 Summit in Hamburg in July 2017 was the United Nations’ sustainable development goals, including those set for the water sector. Despite progress, around 800 million people worldwide do not have adequate access to drinking water. Increasing block tariffs are an instrument...

In business and politics, gifts are often aimed at influencing the recipient at the expense of third parties. In an experimental study, which removes informational and incentive confounds, subjects strongly respond to small gifts even though they understand the gift giver’s intention. Our...

Research has not yet been undertaken on the optimal level of urbanization, notwithstanding the pioneering work of Au and Henderson (2006) on optimal urban concentration. This paper develops two-sector general equilibrium models of urbanization, with and without equity consideration,...

In determining the optimal redistribution of a given population's income, we ask which factor is more important: the social planner's aversion to inequality, embedded in an isoelastic social welfare function indexed by a parameter alpha, or the individuals' concern at having a low relative...

This paper adds three dimensions to the received literature: it models migration when the individuals' preferences regarding their relative income are ordinal, it works out the resulting spatial steady state distribution of the individuals, and it shows that the aggregate of the individuals'...

The death of welfare economics has been declared several times. One of the reasons cited for these plural obituaries is that Kenneth Arrow's impossibility theorem, as set out in his path-breaking Social Choice and Individual Values in 1951, has shown that the social welfare function - one of the...

Much is known about heterogeneity in social preferences and about heterogeneity in lying aversion - but little is known about the relation between the two at the individual level. Are the altruists simply up- right persons who do not only care about the well-being of others but also about...

Based on a non-parametric, structural equation modelling framework, this paper compares a set of highly congested US and European airports in order to assess the impact of approaches on overall social welfare, considering airline and airport surplus and passenger welfare. This paper discusses...

This paper shows that the public provision of private goods may be justified on pure efficiency grounds in an environment where individuals have relative consumption concerns. By providing private goods, governments directly intervene in the consumption structure, and thereby have an instrument...

Christmas is when people are expected to act selflessly for the well-being of others, but are people actually more altruistic at this time of the year? Responding to this question poses a challenge because of the confounding factors of charitable tax breaks, reciprocity motives, direct social...

Team Tennis competitions produce aggregate scores for teams, and thus team rankings, based on head-to-head matchups of individual team members. Similar scoring rules can be used to rank any two groups that must be compared on the basis of paired elements. We explore such rules in terms of their...

Multidimensional welfare analysis has recently been revived by money-metric measures based on explicit fairness principles and the respect of individual preferences. To operationalize this approach, preference heterogeneity can be inferred from the observation of individual choices (revealed...

This paper investigates - in a large heterogeneous sample - the relationship between social preferences on the one hand, and socioeconomic factors and political preferences on the other hand. Socioeconomic factors correlate with social preferences, and social preferences robustly shape political...

We develop and test a theory of voting and turnout decisions that integrates self-interest, social preferences, and expressive motives. Our model implies that if pocketbook benefits are relevant, voters either perceive their impact on the outcome to be non-negligible, or expressive motivations...

This paper adds three dimensions to the received literature: it models migration when the individuals' preferences regarding their relative income are ordinal, it works out the resulting spatial steady-state distribution of the individuals, and it shows that the aggregate of the individuals'...

We develop and test a theory of voting and turnout decisions that integrates self-interest, social preferences, and expressive motives. Our model implies that if pocketbook benefits are relevant, voters either perceive their impact on the outcome to be non-negligible, or expressive motivations...

We attempt to link laboratory-based measures of preferences with measures of school performance. We measure in an incentivized way risk, time, social and competitive preferences and also cognitive abilities of university students and look for associations between these measures and two important...

This study presents descriptive and causal evidence on the role of social environment for the formation of prosociality. In a first step, we show that socio-economic status (SES) as well as the intensity of mother-child interaction and mothers prosocial attitudes are systematically related to...

A transfer from a richer individual to a poorer one seems to be the most intuitive and straightforward way of reducing income inequality in a society. However, can such a transfer reduce the welfare of the society? We show that a rich-to-poor transfer can induce a response in the individuals'...

A transfer from a richer individual to poorer A transfer from a richer individual to poorer seems to be the most seems to be the most intuitive and straightforward way of reducing income inequality in a society. However, can such a transfer reduce the welfare of the society? We show that a rich...