Related papers: Hippocratic Utility
We provide sufficient conditions under which a utility function may be recovered from a finite choice experiment. Identification, as is commonly understood in decision theory, is not enough. We provide a general recoverability result that…
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:…
We propose an integration of possibility theory into non-classical logics. We obtain many formal results that generalize the case where possibility and necessity functions are based on classical logic. We show how useful such an approach is…
We apply the maximum entropy principle to economic systems in equilibrium and find the density function for the market's wealth. This is the same as price density which is used for insurance pricing. The risk aversion parameter of the agent…
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…
Reliability (survival analysis, to biostatisticians) is a key ingredient for mak- ing decisions that mitigate the risk of failure. The other key ingredient is utility. A decision theoretic framework harnesses the two, but to invoke this…
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…
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…
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…
As AI systems are increasingly used to guide decisions, it is essential that they follow ethical principles. A core principle in medicine is non-maleficence, often equated with ``do no harm''. A formal definition of harm based on…
When evaluating policies that affect future generations, the most commonly used criterion is the discounted utilitarian rule. However, in terms of intergenerational fairness, it is difficult to justify prioritizing the current generation…
Background: Understanding the distinction between function and role is vexing and difficult. While it appears to be useful, in practice this distinction is hard to apply, particularly within biology. Results: I take an evolutionary…
The unit selection problem aims to identify a set of individuals who are most likely to exhibit a desired mode of behavior, for example, selecting individuals who would respond one way if encouraged and a different way if not encouraged.…
We consider a continuous-time market with proportional transaction costs. Under appropriate assumptions we prove the existence of optimal strategies for investors who maximize their worst-case utility over a class of possible models. We…
In this note, we explicitly solve the problem of maximizing utility of consumption (until the minimum of bankruptcy and the time of death) with a constraint on the probability of lifetime ruin, which can be interpreted as a risk measure on…
This study proposes a new efficiency requirement, a minimal almost weak Pareto principle, which says that x is socially better than y whenever the only one individual never prefers y to x, and all the others prefers x to y. Then, I show…
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 study the existence of equilibrium when agents' preferences may not beconvex. For some specific utility functions, we provide a necessary and sufficientcondition under which there exists an equilibrium. The standard approach cannot be…
We provide and axiomatize a representation for preferences over lotteries that generalizes the expected utility model. Since the representation uses different utility functions to evaluate different lotteries, the preferences can be…
How should well-being be prioritised in society, and what trade-offs are people willing to make between fairness and personal well-being? We investigate these questions using a stated preference experiment with a nationally representative…