Related papers: Utilitarian Social Choice and Distributional Welfa…
Fair clustering has traditionally focused on ensuring equitable group representation or equalizing group-specific clustering costs. However, Dickerson et al. (2025) recently showed that these fairness notions may yield undesirable or…
I introduce a concave function of allocations and prices -- the economy's potential -- which measures the difference between utilitarian social welfare and its dual. I show that Walrasian equilibria correspond to roots of the potential:…
In the context of aggregating von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, we show that bounded violations of the Pareto conditions characterize aggregation rules that are approximately utilitarian. When a single utility function is intended to…
In search engines, online marketplaces and other human-computer interfaces large collectives of individuals sequentially interact with numerous alternatives of varying quality. In these contexts, trial and error (exploration) is crucial for…
How to distribute welfare in a society is a key issue in the subject of distributional justice, which is deeply involved with notions of fairness. Following a thought experiment by Dworkin, this work considers a society of individuals with…
A dynamic model of collective consumption and saving decisions made by a finite number of agents with constant but different discount rates is developed. Collective utility is a weighted sum of individual utilities with time-varying utility…
It is standard in computational social choice to analyse welfare considerations under the assumptions of normalized utilities. In this note, we summarize some common reasons for this approach. We then mention another justification which is…
In a two-stage model of choice a decision maker first shortlists a given menu and then applies her preferences. We show that a sizeable class of these models run into significant issues in terms of identification of preferences…
There is a lack of consensus within the literature as to how `fairness' of algorithmic systems can be measured, and different metrics can often be at odds. In this paper, we approach this task by drawing on the ethical frameworks of…
This paper examines normatively acceptable criteria for evaluating social states when individuals are responsible for their skills or productivity and these factors should be accounted for. We consider social choice rules over sets of…
To determine the welfare implications of price changes in demand data, we introduce a revealed preference relation over prices. We show that the absence of cycles in this relation characterizes a consumer who trades off the utility of…
We study budget aggregation under $\ell_1$-utilities, a model for collective decision making in which agents with heterogeneous preferences must allocate a public budget across a set of alternatives. Each agent reports their preferred…
Recent literature in the last Maximum Entropy workshop introduced an analogy between cumulative probability distributions and normalized utility functions. Based on this analogy, a utility density function can de defined as the derivative…
Instead of testing for unanimous agreement, I propose learning how broad of a consensus favors one distribution over another (of earnings, productivity, asset returns, test scores, etc.). Specifically, given a sample from each of two…
In consumer theory, ranking available objects by means of preference relations yields the most common description of individual choices. However, preference-based models assume that individuals: (1) give their preferences only between pairs…
The relationship of policy choice by majority voting and by maximization of utilitarian welfare has long been discussed. I consider choice between a status quo and a proposed policy when persons have interpersonally comparable cardinal…
We axiomatically define a cardinal social inefficiency function, which, given a set of alternatives and individuals' vNM preferences over the alternatives, assigns a unique number -- the social inefficiency -- to each alternative. These…
In [G. Kalai, A Fourier-theoretic Perspective on the Condorcet Paradox and Arrow's Theorem, Adv. in Appl. Math. 29(3) (2002), pp. 412--426], Kalai investigated the probability of a rational outcome for a generalized social welfare function…
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…
We consider a simple sequential allocation procedure for sharing indivisible items between agents in which agents take turns to pick items. Supposing additive utilities and independence between the agents, we show that the expected utility…