Related papers: Demand and Welfare Analysis in Discrete Choice Mod…

We develop new robust discrete choice tools to learn about the average willingness to pay for a price subsidy and its effects on demand given exogenous, discrete variation in prices. Our starting point is a nonparametric, nonseparable model…

This paper proposes a framewrok for analyzing how the welfare effects of policy interventions are distributed across individuals when those effects are unobserved. Rather than focusing solely on average outcomes, the approach uses readily…

To choose between two discrete goods, a consumer pays attention to only those with prices below a threshold. From these, she chooses her most preferred good. We assume consumers in a population have the same preference but may have…

Empirical welfare analyses often impose stringent parametric assumptions on individuals' preferences and neglect unobserved preference heterogeneity. We develop a framework to conduct individual and social welfare analysis for discrete…

We develop new experimental paradigms for measuring welfare in language models. We compare verbal reports of models about their preferences with preferences expressed through behavior when navigating a virtual environment and selecting…

This paper studies the problem of optimally allocating treatments in the presence of spillover effects, using information from a (quasi-)experiment. I introduce a method that maximizes the sample analog of average social welfare when…

We analyze demand settings where heterogeneous consumers maximize utility for product attributes subject to a nonlinear budget constraint. We develop nonparametric methods for welfare-analysis of interventions that change the constraint.…

The econometric literature on treatment-effects typically takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities. We show how to incorporate aggregate utility within econometric…

Based on the observation that many existing discrete choice models admit a welfare function of utilities whose gradient gives the choice probability vector, we propose a new representation of discrete choice model which we call the…

We consider a model of socially interacting individuals that make a binary choice in a context of positive additive endogenous externalities. It encompasses as particular cases several models from the sociology and economics literature. We…

This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…

This paper studies policy learning for continuous treatments from observational data. Continuous treatments present more significant challenges than discrete ones because population welfare may need nonparametric estimation, and policy…

Research on promoting cooperation among autonomous, self-regarding agents has often focused on the bi-objective optimisation problem: minimising the total incentive cost while maximising the frequency of cooperation. However, the optimal…

Neuroeconomics promises to ground welfare analysis in neural and computational evidence about how people value outcomes, learn from experience and exercise self-control. At the same time, policy and commercial actors increasingly invoke…

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…

This paper introduces a novel spatial interaction model to explore the decision-making processes of a resource allocator and local agents, with central and local governments serving as empirical representations. The model captures two key…

Incomplete take-up of welfare benefits remains a major policy puzzle. This paper decomposes the causes of incomplete welfare take-up into two mechanisms: inattention, where households do not consider program participation, and active…

In auction and matching markets, estimating the welfare effects of demand-side treatments is challenging because of spillovers through the mechanism. We develop a quasi-experimental approach that avoids parametric assumptions typically…

Large-scale online recommendation systems must facilitate the allocation of a limited number of items among competing users while learning their preferences from user feedback. As a principled way of incorporating market constraints and…

Multilateral index numbers are often used to make claims about welfare, such as treating PPPs as cross-country costs of living or real incomes as indicators of living standards. However, such interpretations may not be consistent with the…