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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Segal (2000) question about utility opportunity set
I am reading a JPE paper "Let's agree all dictatorship are equally bad" from Uzi Segal （2000）.
I have a small problem with this paper. We have the following Utility Opportunity Set (UOS):
$$ S(w)=\{...
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How to find (document) the actual costs of a specific US government social program?
I had an interesting discussion today while volunteering at a food bank program. The individual I spoke with was a retired math professor who stated his research makes him believe that significant ...
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Removing a degree of freedom from relative utilitarianism
Relative utilitarianism takes utilities as reported by agents, rescales them so that, for each agent, the alternatives have utility values between 0 and 1, and then chooses an alternative to maximize ...
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Nash social welfare function with negative exponential utilities
I got one question about the Nash-SWF. Typically it is defined as the product of individual utilities, ie.
$$
NSWF:=u_1(x_1) \cdot u_2(x_2) \cdot u_3(x_3) \cdot ...
$$
For this to make sense, ...
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1answer
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Ordinal axiomatization of proportional division
A proportional division is a kind of fair division in which a resource is divided among $n$ partners with subjective valuations, and each partner receives a share which is worth for him at least $1/n$ ...
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What effect does changing the retirement age have on employment?
I had an interesting casual discussion with a colleague the other day.
A lot of western economies at least, such as New Zealand, have some form of retirement pension. It New Zealand it's called ...
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Post-redistribution Lorenz curve comparison with reranking in R
Using R, assume the population income for N= {1.. 7} looks like $X_1$= c(1,3,5,7,7,19,21). Use the Lc() function from the "ineq" package to plot the corresponding Lorenz curve $L_{X_1}(p_1)$.
Next, ...
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1answer
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The median as a welfare function
In an economy with several agents who have different utility functions, it is common to define a welfare function, defined as an aggregate of the utility functions of the different agents. Then we can ...
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For what demand function is a monopoly most harmful?
Consider a firm with zero marginal cost. If it gives the product for free, then all the demand is satisfied and the social welfare increases by the maximum possible amount; call this increase $W$.
...
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Ultrafilters in Social Choice Theory Literature Request
I am an undergraduate math major who is intrigued about social choice theory. I am in the early stages of planning my senior project and was wondering if anybody had some recommendations of literature ...
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Implementing Coasian bargaining to achieve social welfare
In this excellent answer, Ubiquitous elaborates on the Coasian solution as an alternative to Pigouvian subsidies. I wanted to explore and understand the solution a bit further.
Consider the setting ...
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Economic Model: Incentive Compatible Market Economy that Satisfies Basic Needs
The capitalism system relies on a monetary system for exchange of goods and services. This appears to cause a large number of problems. For example, we shun those that don't have money.
Is there an ...
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Why is the derivative of this SWF non-positive?
This question is related to the development of The Joint Giving Theorem (by S. Kolm).
There are two types of agents: benevolent and beneficiaries.
Benevolents' preferences are represented by ...
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1answer
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Policy relevance of the optimal taxation given uncertainty about social welfare specification
One common criticism in the optimal taxation literature is the specification of the social welfare function. The optimal taxation literature (I have the Mirrlees framework in mind) relies on first ...
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1answer
223 views
Mechanisms to incentivise social welfare
Suppose there is a set of agents causing loss $l_i$ to themselves and aggregate loss $L$ to the society, both of which can be minimised by their investments $c_i$.
The social planner who is concerned ...
