The Deferred Acceptance (DA) algorithm is stable and strategy-proof, but can produce matchings that are Pareto-inefficient for students, and thus several alternatives have been proposed to correct this inefficiency that only involve consented priority violations. However, we show that these...

We develop a unified cost-benefit framework that allows for a better understanding of nature conservation and climate policies under risk and uncertainty. We derive modified Hotelling rules from a social planner’s welfare optimization. They reveal four forces that jointly determine market...

We consider welfare impacts of prohibitive tariffs on trading partners. Initially, there is prohibitive tariff by one country and a zero tariff by its trading partner. Thereafter, the trading partner also resorts to prohibitive tariff. We demonstrate how prohibitive tariffs by the trading...

Revealed preference theory (RPT) and its behavioral extension (BRPT) underpin an important strand of welfare economics. Their normative appeal rests on the claim that welfare can be inferred from observed behavior without substantive assumptions about what agents should value - a property I call...

We review the evolution of the concept of utility in economics, addressing the conceptual and terminological fragmentation that characterises the interdisciplinary debate. This study adopts the scoping review framework to systematically analyse the main theoretical approaches, ranging from...

The well-known cooperative game solution core, with its strict stability requirement, provides no solution for non-balanced games. Subiza et al. (2025) relaxes the stability concept of the core and proposes δ-stable set, a non-empty solution for every essential TU-game. However, their approach...

Despite crowdfunding platforms' growing involvement in financing welfare, related ethical issues have received little scholarly attention. To address this gap, we focus on GoFundMe, the leading welfare crowdfunding platform in the US, to examine whether it facilitates the establishment of a just...

We establish the Subgradient Theorem for monotone correspondences -- a monotone correspondence is equal to the subdifferential of a potential if and only if it is conservative, i.e. its integral along a closed path vanishes irrespective of the selection from the correspondence along the path. We...

This paper characterizes a novel class of welfare criteria for settings with endogenous population. The core innovation is to treat parents’ fertility preferences as ethically relevant, deferring to them on the quality--quantity trade-off under conditions of equality. The resulting family of...

Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of utilities that render a given allocation Pareto optimal. We...

We reappraise the Arrow problem by studying the aggregation of choice functions. We do so in the general framework of judgment aggregation, in which choice functions are naturally representable by specifying, for each menu A and each alternative x in A, whether x is choosable from A, or not. Our...

This paper examines paternalistic preferences in large-scale experiments in the U.S. Participants decide whether to intervene to prevent a stakeholder, mistaken about their options, to make a choice that is misaligned with their preferences. We find that the willingness to intervene strongly...

This paper contrasts two kinds of political economy, represented by welfare economics and social choice theory on the one hand and James M. Buchanan's constitutional political economy on the other hand. It posits that the difference between the two kinds has its roots in the different normative...

Why is in-kind aid a prominent feature of welfare systems? We present a lab-in-the-field experiment involving members of the general U.S. population and SNAP recipients. After documenting a widespread desire to limit recipients’ choices, we quantify the relative importance of (i) welfarist...