Related papers: Opportunity-Sensitive Social Welfare
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…
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…
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 discover a fundamental and previously unrecognized structure within the class of additively separable social welfare functions that makes it straightforward to fully characterize and elicit the social preferences of an inequality-averse…
This paper develops theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. Our new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of…
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…
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 formulate a flexible micro-to-macro kinetic model which is able to explain the emergence of income profiles out of a whole of individual economic interactions. The model is expressed by a system of several nonlinear differential…
Survey data are widely used to study how income inequality, poverty, and welfare evolve over time. A common practice is to estimate the income distribution separately for each year, treating annual observations as independent…
Current methodologies in machine learning analyze the effects of various statistical parity notions of fairness primarily in light of their impacts on predictive accuracy and vendor utility loss. In this paper, we propose a new framework…
We study the problem of a planner who resolves risk-return trade-offs - like financial investment decisions - on behalf of a collective of agents with heterogeneous risk preferences. The planner's objective is a two-stage utility functional…
We study fair allocation of constrained resources, where a market designer optimizes overall welfare while maintaining group fairness. In many large-scale settings, utilities are not known in advance, but are instead observed after…
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…
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…
Given an initial resource allocation, where some agents may envy others or where a different distribution of resources might lead to higher social welfare, our goal is to improve the allocation without reassigning resources. We consider a…
Policy makers need to decide whether to treat or not to treat heterogeneous individuals. The optimal treatment choice depends on the welfare function that the policy maker has in mind and it is referred to as the policy learning problem. I…
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…
Motivated by applications such as college admission and insurance rate determination, we propose an evaluation problem where the inputs are controlled by strategic individuals who can modify their features at a cost. A learner can only…
This paper introduces a rule for policy selection in the presence of estimation uncertainty, explicitly accounting for estimation risk. The rule belongs to the class of risk-aware rules on the efficient decision frontier, characterized as…
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…