Related papers: What is the general Welfare? Welfare Economic Pers…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We study the interplay of fairness, welfare, and equity considerations in personalized pricing based on customer features. Sellers are increasingly able to conduct price personalization based on predictive modeling of demand conditional on…
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…
Preferences of individuals are distributions of elements generated by generalized functions. Models of economic decision-making derived from such distributions are consistent with results of physiological experiments, and explain any…
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 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 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…
Is it possible to understand or imitate a policy maker's rationale by looking at past decisions they made? We formalize this question as the problem of learning social welfare functions belonging to the well-studied family of power mean…
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…
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more…
This paper concerns Saez and Stantcheva's (2016) generalized social marginal welfare weights, which aggregate losses and gains due to tax policies, while incorporating non-utilitarian ethical considerations. The approach evaluates local tax…
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…
The definition of preferences assigned to individuals is a concept that concerns many disciplines, from economics, with the search of an acceptable outcome for an ensemble of individuals, to decision making an analysis of vote systems. We…
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…
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.…
Recent studies on disparate impact in machine learning applications have sparked a debate around the concept of fairness along with attempts to formalize its different criteria. Many of these approaches focus on reducing prediction errors…