Questions tagged [social-welfare]
Social welfare is a quantitative measure of how good or bad a policy or situation is for a society, overall. It is usually obtained by somehow "aggregating" the utility functions of all the people in that society (e.g. by computing the average utility).
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Why doesn't the government subsidize firms on the condition that they lower prices?
Lets pretend that all production is contingent on fixed cost capital, the good or service made from this capital is sold at a price that means that demand is below what the capital has the capacity to ...
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Building an environmental computable general equilibrium for a developping country
I managed to get help from this website in 2014 for my masters thesis, and now I'm back with more questions.
I'm a PhD student and the issue at hand concerns environmental economics and the costs of ...
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To what extent does national income measure social well being [closed]
National income does not measure social well being.
GDP is used to measure national income
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Deriving a welfare function
I saw this in a paper (however, I cannot derive it):
We define the growth rate of consumption as $g_{C, s} \equiv \frac{C_s}{C_{s-1}}$ and use $C_t=\left(\prod_{s=1}^t g_{C, s}\right) C_0$ to rewrite ...
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Is it possible that pensions (public or private) be actual money saved and “sent” into the future, instead of borrowed from future generations? [closed]
Is it conceivable, from a theoretical point of view, that what we pay today for our future pensions is actually invested somewhere so that we can be 100% certain that those assets will be there for us,...
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Is there a measure of social inequality?
A measure of economic inequality in a population is the gini coefficient.
Is there such a measure of social inequality as well?
The social rights include labor market, the source of income, health ...
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Consumer Welfare vertical differentiation [SOLVED]
Suppose consumers have the standard Tirole's utility $U_A = \theta q + \alpha X_A - P$ if they buy product A and $U_0 = 0$ if they don't buy this product (where $X_A$ is the actual demand of product A)...
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Universal Limited Income
I am new here. Please pardon me for my naive question. However, I am a mathematician, so feel free to use any mathematics to model a toy situation.
I would like to understand what would happen if ...
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Are interest rate hikes regressive?
Central banks are currently hiking interest rates to reduce aggregate demand. How is this reduction in spending distributed across the population? Specifically, what would be the shape of a graph of ...
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Is there a progressive response to inflation?
The conventional response to inflation is to increase central bank interest rates. This seems regressive. Is there a progressive method to stop inflation?
In concrete terms, central bank interest rate ...
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What value does a worker whose job could be automated provide to society?
Has anyone calculated the global benefit of non-workers on government assistance and found their contribution to be less than the assistance they were provided? I'm looking for scientific studies ...
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How to empirically measure the underlying utility function for a 'max EU" SWF? Stated/revealed preferences over uncertain lotteries, or?
Direct answers, as well as pointers to the best literature and textbook treatments, as well as the names of key researchers, are appreciated.
Suppose we are considering policies and transfers that ...
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How *should* weigh income/consumption at different income levels (esp. to the very poor vs poor) ... perhaps in a 'social welfare function'?
What is the best analysis/literature/text, that gives a theoretical justification for approaches that can be used in practice, for
How we should weight income/consumption at different income levels (...
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What is the problem with this opportunity cost example?
The "stand-up economist" Yoram Bauman used the concept of opportunity cost to make the following joke:
[S]omebody offers you a choice between a Snickers bar and a package of M&Ms. ...
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Axiom of Minimal Liberalism & Sen's Theorem of Paretial Liberal
Suppose that a person believes that all humans are guaranteed a set of rights that cannot be taken from them in any situation or circumstance (for example, the right to marry a person of your choice, ...
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Question about Social Welfare Function and Social Profile
What are the meanings of a social welfare function and social profile? How are they related?
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Why the ageing population creates problems for a country to fund old-age social protection program and what solution do we have?
Senior citizens are considered as one of the vulnerable groups and therefore, they need some social protection during their old age. However, we also face the worldwide trend of an ageing population.
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Social welfare in terms of preferences
How does one define a social welfare in terms of individuals’ preferences $\succeq_i$?
If we have utility functions $u_i$ then a social welfare maximizing outcome $x$ is simply one that maximizes $\...
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Rawlsian SWF and Arrow Impossibilty Theorem
given Arrow impossibility theorem the only social welfare function that satisfies unrestricted domain, pareto and the independence of irrelevant alternatives is Dictatorship. However I was wondering ...
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Are means-tested or universal programs more effective at reducing the poverty rate?
Advocates of means-tested programs frequently argue that they will remove inefficiences in the system by directing a larger proportion of the program's budget to people with a genuine need. By ...
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Total Derivative of a Max Function: Maximizing Social Welfare Function
I'm studying public economics but my question here is purely mathematical in nature. I have a function:
$$
V(1-\tau, R) = \max_zu((1-\tau)z+R,z)
$$
I need to take the total derivative of this, in my ...
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In the case of externalities, does the initial allocation of rights affect the final outcome from the perspective of each party?
I think I understand the main implication of the Coase Theorem—that the outcome will be Pareto efficient regardless of the initial allocation of property rights, provided transaction costs are zero, ...
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Would a fair distribution of wealth from the super rich increase the purchasing power/life quality of the average person?
I will start by saying that I do not have any background in finance and that the following question might be very much naive, but it has been bugging me for a while now. The general narrative seems to ...
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Theory of and studies on the long-term effect of governmental redistribution
Proposition 28 from this 2000 survey (Fuller and Geide-stevenson 2010) of American economists shows that 49% of American Economics Association members agree, and 31% agree with provisions, that it is ...
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Why is the equilibrium network size can be less than the socially optimal size in networks w/ positive externalities for single system?
For Context, I am reading http://web.mit.edu/rpindyck/www/Courses/NetEx19.pdf. The chapter talks about network externalities in single system like fax machine, email, vaccinations for measles. ...
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What percentage of economists recommend basic welfare like food stamps and temporary assistance for needy families?
Is it similar to minimum wage in that opinion is approximately split down party lines, seen in this 2006 survey: https://people.uwec.edu/jamelsem/fte/fte/efl/teacher_stuff/articles/economists_agree....
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What are the pros and cons of Vienna's publicly owned social housing market?
This article and this article report on Vienna's social housing market. Rent controlled since 1917 and now publicly owned.
What are the relative pros and cons from an economic standpoint of such a ...
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How can an outcome be Pareto efficient but not Kaldor-Hicks efficient?
An policy is a Pareto improvement if it makes some people better off and no one worse off. And a policy is a Kaldor-Hicks improvement if it can be turned into a Pareto improvement by redistributing ...
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Do any social welfare functionals, other than maximin, meet all of Arrow's conditions plus invariance regarding ordinal level comparability?
In the literature on social welfare functionals, the only example I've seen of a functional which meets all of Arrow's conditions–––or at least utility analogues of Arrow's conditions–––plus ...
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If an ordinal-scaled utility function is defined via strictly increasing transformation, how can it represent a case of indifference?
Problem: According to Wulf Gaertner’s (2009, p. 13) A Primer in Social Choice Theory, any strictly increasing transformation of an individual’s ordinal utility function is informationally equivalent. ...
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Question regarding social welfare in the presence of externalities
I am currently learning high school level economics and I do not understand how indirect taxation may increase net social welfare in the presence of negative production externality.
This is because, ...
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Providing subsidies affects Marginal Private cost but not Marginal Social Cost?
According to the theory that I'm seeing on the internet and in textbooks, when a government wants to correct underproduction due to a positive externality of production, they can decide to subsidize ...
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Numerical Question on a subsidized monopoly
Suppose a government agency has a monopoly in the provision of internet connections.
The marginal cost of providing internet connections is $ \frac12$, whereas the inverse demand
function is given by: ...
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Can consumer surplus be negative if a consumer is forced to make a purchase?
Assume there is a good that a producer sells for $100$. A consumer's willingness to pay for that good is $50$. However a government program forces consumers to purchase the good irrespective of their ...
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Have I found the correct Emission Price
Let's say that there is a hotel owner $(H)$ and a woodworker $(W)$ working in close proximity to one another.
The woodworker produces $x$ units to sell at market at $p_{x}=6,5$. From the woodworking ...
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Question about the "No Dictator" Criterion in Arrow's Impossibility Theorem
I have a question about Arrow's impossibility theorem. I'm not sure I understand exactly what is meant by the "no dictator" criterion. Does the presence of a "dictator" mean that across all possible ...
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Why would a politician sollicit foreign investors to come and buy real estate?
In the Netherlands we have a shortage of affordable housing. Especially in urban areas, especially housing in the price ranges affordable for young people and middle and low incomes.
This is pretty ...
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How much to earn to break-even throughout life [closed]
Firstly, my apologies if this isn't the right forum for this - I couldn't spot a better one!
We are all born, pay taxes and die.
Depending on where we live, those taxes will (hopefully) be used to ...
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Non-axiomatic definition of well-being
I first wanted to ask this on philosophy@SE but, on a second thought, decided this might be a better place.
If we defined a general policy's objective being "to maximize well being and minimize ...
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Social conflicts in economic growth models
I'm highly interested in theories and models which explain how do social conflicts influence economic growth.
What papers on the topic can you recommend? I was searching for some seminal and most ...
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Set of utilitarian weights
I am wondering if there are literature which studies specific properties of the set of utilitarian weights?
To be more specific, when we have some axioms that characterize the preference of a social ...
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Concept of return on investment but for the state instead a firm
So, following a discussion I had today, I have the following question.
If we use the return on investment (ROI) to describe the gain of an investment is there a similar concept not for a company but ...
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Universal Basic Income [closed]
In 2017 some countries have adopted the Universal Basic Income as an alternative to Welfare Payments, my question is, is it economically feasible by governments?
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Anonymity in social welfare function
Currently reading David Adler's text on distributional weights in benefit-cost analysis (https://scholarship.law.duke.edu/faculty_scholarship/3110/), I cannot manage to fully grasp the definition of ...
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Is production side (or so called "firms") considered in "social welfare"?
When micro-economists refer to "social welfare" as measure of an outcome of a competitive equilibrium economic model, or "welfare economics" in general, is this taken to include a measure of the ...
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The social welfare of a unique general competitive equilibrium in an exchange economy
The first theorem of welfare economics states that "Every Walrasian Equilibrium (WE) is Pareto Efficient (PE)" - Microeconomic Theory Nicholson, Synder 11th ed. p477. But PE is quite a weak condition. ...
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Can we add well-being into macro model as an endogenous variable?
People talk a lot about well-being as an objective of macro policy (together with gdp growth). So if well-being is an objective, i'm wondering if we can add well-being into macro model as an ...
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Can monopolistic dead weight loss persist without government intervention? If so how?
Can monopolistic dead weight loss persist without government intervention? If so how? I am researching monopolies and find dead weight loss proposed as an evil of monopolies but i can not find any ...
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Consumer surplus with isoelastic demand
Let $q(p) = \frac{1}{p}$ denote the demand function and $p^*$ some equilibrium price. Consumer surplus is defined as
\begin{align}
CS = \int_{p^*}^\infty\frac{1}{p} dp= \ln(\infty) - \ln(p^*) = \...
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Private and Social Optimum with externality in this example
Firstly, I wanted to know if we may be consider as an externality, a situation such that a customer A bought a bike to a seller B, not properly checked - and which may provoke some accidents.
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