Related papers: Utilitarian Social Choice and Distributional Welfa…
This paper studies preference aggregation under uncertainty in the multi-profile framework and characterizes a new class of aggregation rules that address classical concerns about Harsanyi's (1955) utilitarian rules. Our aggregation rules,…
We consider social welfare functions when the preferences of individual agents and society maximize subjective expected utility in the tradition of Savage. A system of axioms is introduced whose unique solution is the social welfare…
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…
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…
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…
In the theory of social choice the research is focused around the projection of individual preference orders to the social preference order. Also, the justification of the preference order formalism begins with the concept of utility i.e.…
Researchers do not know what the framers of the United States Constitution intended when they wrote of the general Welfare. Nevertheless, economists can conjecture by specifying social welfare functions that aim to express the preferences…
Improving social welfare is a complex challenge requiring policymakers to optimize objectives across multiple time horizons. Evaluating the impact of such policies presents a fundamental challenge, as those that appear suboptimal in the…
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…
Decision theory does not traditionally include uncertainty over utility functions. We argue that the a person's utility value for a given outcome can be treated as we treat other domain attributes: as a random variable with a density…
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 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…
We characterize Pareto optimality via "near" weighted utilitarian welfare maximization. One characterization sequentially maximizes utilitarian welfare functions using a finite sequence of nonnegative and eventually positive welfare…
Iterative voting is a natural model of repeated strategic decision-making in social choice theory when agents have the opportunity to update their votes prior to finalizing the group decision. Prior work has analyzed the efficacy of…
Using both single-index measures and stochastic dominance concepts, we show how Bayesian inference can be used to make multivariate welfare comparisons. A four-dimensional distribution for the well-being attributes income, mental health,…
Many policies allocate harms or benefits that are uncertain in nature: they produce distributions over the population in which individuals have different probabilities of incurring harm or benefit. Comparing different policies thus involves…
We propose a new model for aggregating preferences over a set of indivisible items based on a quantile value. In this model, each agent is endowed with a specific quantile, and the value of a given bundle is defined by the corresponding…
Medical "Crisis Standards of Care" call for a utilitarian allocation of scarce resources in emergencies, while favoring the worst-off under normal conditions. Inspired by such triage rules, we introduce social welfare functions whose…
We consider social welfare functions that satisfy Arrow's classic axioms of independence of irrelevant alternatives and Pareto optimality when the outcome space is the convex hull of some finite set of alternatives. Individual and…
The broad concept of an individual's welfare is actually a cluster of related specific concepts that bear a "family resemblance" to one another. One might care about how a policy will affect people both in terms of their subjective…