相关论文: Endogenous Inequality Aversion: Decision criteria …

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…

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…

We consider social resource allocations that deliver an array of scarce supports to a diverse population. Such allocations pervade social service delivery, such as provision of homeless services, assignment of refugees to cities, among…

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…

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…

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…

We consider the egalitarian welfare aspects of random assignment mechanisms when agents have unrestricted cardinal utilities over the objects. We give bounds on how well different random assignment mechanisms approximate the optimal…

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…

In this paper, we explore optimal treatment allocation policies that target distributional welfare. Most literature on treatment choice has considered utilitarian welfare based on the conditional average treatment effect (ATE). While…

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…

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…

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…

Sequential allocation is a simple and attractive mechanism for the allocation of indivisible goods. Agents take turns, according to a policy, to pick items. Sequential allocation is guaranteed to return an allocation which is efficient but…

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…

This paper proposes an optimal policy that targets the average welfare of the worst-off $\alpha$-fraction of the post-treatment outcome distribution. We refer to this policy as the $\alpha$-Expected Welfare Maximization ($\alpha$-EWM) rule,…

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…

The egalitarian equivalent, $ee$, of a societal distribution of outcomes with mean $m$ is the outcome level such that the evaluator is indifferent between the distribution of outcomes and a society in which everyone obtains an outcome of…

We consider social welfare functions that satisfy Arrow's classic axioms of independence of irrelevant alternatives and Pareto optimality when the outcome space is the convex hull of some finite set of alternatives. Individual and…

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…