Related papers: Incorporating Social Welfare in Program-Evaluation…

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…

In this paper, we explore optimal treatment allocation policies that target distributional welfare. Most literature on treatment choice has considered utilitarian welfare based on the conditional average treatment effect (ATE). While…

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.…

Heterogeneous treatment effects are of major interest in economics. For example, a poverty reduction measure would be best evaluated by its effects on those who would be poor in the absence of the treatment, or by the share among the poor…

Harsanyi (1955) showed that the only way to aggregate individual preferences into a social preference which satisfies certain desirable properties is ``utilitarianism'', whereby the social utility function is a weighted average of…

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…

Many real-life settings of consumer-choice involve social interactions, causing targeted policies to have spillover-effects. This paper develops novel empirical tools for analyzing demand and welfare-effects of policy-interventions in…

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…

We study the optimal joint intervention of a planner who can influence both the standalone marginal utilities of agents in a network and the weights of the links connecting them. The welfare-maximizing intervention displays two key…

Consider a causal structure with endogeneity (i.e., unobserved confoundedness) in empirical data, where an instrumental variable is available. In this setting, we show that the mean social welfare function can be identified and represented…

We develop an axiomatic framework to evaluate income distributions from the perspective of an opportunity-egalitarian social planner. Building on a formal link with the literature on decision theory under ambiguity, we characterize a class…

This paper considers quantile-welfare evaluation of social welfare as an alternative to utilitarian evaluation. Manski (1988) originally proposed and studied maximization of quantile utility as a model of individual decision making under…

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 provide theoretical results for the estimation and inference of a class of welfare and value functionals of the nonparametric conditional average treatment effect (CATE) function under optimal treatment assignment, i.e., treatment is…

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…

In settings where units' outcomes are affected by others' treatments, there has been a proliferation of ways to quantify effects of treatments on outcomes, including via indirect exposure to other units' treatments. Here we consider two…

Participatory budgeting (PB) is a voting paradigm for distributing a divisible resource, usually called a budget, among a set of projects by aggregating the preferences of individuals over these projects. It is implemented quite extensively…

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…

This paper develops a framework for identifying treatment effects when a policy simultaneously alters both the incentive to participate and the outcome of interest -- such as hiring decisions and wages in response to employment subsidies;…

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…