Related papers: Robust Welfare under Imperfect Competition
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…
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…
We consider the problem of repeatedly choosing policies to maximize social welfare. Welfare is a weighted sum of private utility and public revenue. Earlier outcomes inform later policies. Utility is not observed, but indirectly inferred.…
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…
In various markets where sellers compete in price, price oscillations are observed rather than convergence to equilibrium. Such fluctuations have been empirically observed in the retail market for gasoline, in airline pricing and in the…
This paper develops a robust and efficient method for policy learning from observational data in the presence of unobserved confounding, complementing existing instrumental variable (IV) based approaches. We employ the marginal sensitivity…
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…
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…
Many applied decision-making problems have a dynamic component: The policymaker needs not only to choose whom to treat, but also when to start which treatment. For example, a medical doctor may choose between postponing treatment (watchful…
Many policy problems involve designing individualized treatment allocation rules to maximize the equilibrium social welfare of interacting agents. Focusing on large-scale simultaneous decision games with strategic complementarities, we…
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 consider the efficient outcome of a canonical economic market model involving buyers and sellers with independent and identically distributed random valuations and costs, respectively. When the number of buyers and sellers is large, we…
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…
We study social welfare in one-sided matching markets where the goal is to efficiently allocate n items to n agents that each have a complete, private preference list and a unit demand over the items. Our focus is on allocation mechanisms…
An employer contracts with a worker to incentivize efforts whose productivity depends on ability; the worker then enters a market that pays him contingent on ability evaluation. With non-additive monitoring technology, the interdependence…
We study resource allocation in two-sided markets from a fundamental perspective and introduce a general modeling and algorithmic framework to effectively incorporate the complex and multidimensional aspects of fairness. Our main technical…
We use a continuous-time random walk (CTRW) to model market fluctuation data from times when traders experience excessive losses or excessive profits. We analytically derive "superstatistics" that accurately model empirical market activity…
This paper examines optimal risk sharing for empirically realistic risk attitudes, providing results on Pareto optimality, competitive equilibria, utility frontiers, and the first and second theorems of welfare. Contrary to common…
Estimation and counterfactual analysis in dynamic structural models rely on assumptions about the dynamic process of latent variables, which may be misspecified. We propose a framework to quantify the sensitivity of scalar parameters of…