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Publications (116)
In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of inclusive growth, the existence of income mobility over a lon...
This chapter reviews the welfarist approach to population ethics. This chapter provides an overview of the critical-level utilitarian population principles and their generalized counterparts, examine important properties of these principles and discuss their relationships to other variable population social evaluation rules. The chapter illustrates...
This paper examines principles for social evaluation under uncertainty in environments with a variable population. In contrast
to most of the literature, we employ a model that is formulated in terms of prospects rather than lotteries. Starting from
a fixed-population result, a multi-profile variant of Harsanyi’s social aggregation theorem is exten...
A social-evaluation functional assigns a social ranking of alternatives to each information profile in its domain. In the classical multi-profile model of social choice, profiles are restricted to welfare information: all non-welfare information is implicitly assumed to be fixed. Because of this, the conventional approach does not allow us to disce...
This article considers measures of individual welfare change for projects that change the state distribution of prices and incomes. For a consumer whose preferences satisfy the expected utility hypothesis, we investigate whether there is an increasing function of the state-contingent compensating variations that is positive valued if and only if a...
This note reexamines the single-profile approach to social-choice theory. If an alternative is interpreted as a social state of affairs or a history of the world, it can be argued that a multi-profile approach is inappropriate because the information profile is determined by the set of alternatives. However, single-profile approaches are criticized...
Abstract Some household expenditures, such as those for subsistence or basic needs, are fixed. Using the methodology of equivalence scales, we develop a model in which differences in fixed costs of characteristics across households can be identified from household behaviour. Equivalent expenditure for a household is the expenditure needed to bring...
Public policies frequently involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to assess the corresponding feasible choices on normative grounds, criteria for social evaluation that...
The proof of Theorem 2 in our paper [Soc. Choice Welfare 24, No. 2, 253–267 (2005; Zbl 1100.91021)] is incorrect, due to the erroneous substitution of an earlier version in the production process. Here the correct proof is given along with a statement of the result.
This note is to correct an error in Donaldson and Pendakur (2004) in this Journal. In bEquivalent-expenditure functions and expenditure-dependent equivalence scalesQ ,w e propose equivalence scales which are log-linear in expenditure and show that they are identifiable from behaviour under the maintained assumption of log-linearity. In the empirica...
This book presents an exploration of the idea of the common or social good, extended so that alternatives with different populations can be ranked. The approach is, in the main, welfarist, basing rankings on the well-being, broadly conceived, of those who are alive (or ever lived). The axiomatic method is employed, and topics investigated include:...
This paper presents and investigates a new class of equivalent-expenditure functions that is a generalization of the one that corresponds to exact (independent-of-base) equivalence scales. It provides less restrictive household demands, especially for children’s goods, and has associated equivalence scales that may depend on expenditure. We show th...
Public policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to assess the corresponding feasible choices on normative grounds, criteria for social evaluation that are...
This paper characterizes welfarist social evaluation in a multi-profile setting where, in addition to multiple utility profiles, there may be more than one profile of non-welfare information. We prove a new version of the welfarism theorem in this alternative framework, and we demonstrate that adding a plausible and weak anonymity property to the w...
Intertemporal social-evaluation rules provide us with social criteria that can be used to assess the relative desirability of utility distributions across generations. The trade-offs between the well-being of different generations implicit in each such rule reflect the underlying ethical position on issues of intergenerational equity or justice. We...
L'article examine les conditions qui permettent de satisfaire simultanément les versions ex ante et ex post du principe de Pareto, lorsqu'on cesse d'imposer l'hypothèse de l'utilité espérée aux préférences individuelles et sociales. Avec des probabilités subjectives qui peuvent varier, on obtient trois théorèmes d'impossibilité sans avoir à faire c...
This paper provides new versions of Harsanyi’s social aggregation theorem that are formulated in terms of prospects rather than lotteries. Strengthening an earlier result, fixed-population ex-ante utilitarianism is characterized in a multi-profile setting with fixed probabilities. In addition, we extend the social aggregation theorem to social-eval...
This chapter provides a survey of utilitarian theories of justice. We review and discuss axiomatizations of utilitarian and generalized-utilitarian social-evaluation functionals in a welfarist framework. Section 2 introduces, along with some basic definitions, social-evaluation functionals. Furthermore, we discuss several information-invariance ass...
Many decisions regarding the choice of public policies affect the size and composition of the population. In order to choose rationally in those situations, therefore, normative criteria must be capable of comparing states of affairs with different populations. This paper introduces a new class of population principles (variable-population social o...
This paper characterizes welfarist social evaluation in a multi-profile setting where, in addition to multiple utility profiles, it is assumed that there are several profiles of non-welfare information. We prove new versions of the welfarism theorems in this alternative framework, and we illustrate that a very plausible and weak anonymity property...
Critical-level generalized-utilitarian population principles with positive critical levels pro-vide an ethically attractive way of avoiding the repugnant conclusion. We discuss the axiomatic foundations of critical-level generalized utilitarianism and investigate its rela-tionship to the sadistic and strong sadistic conclusions. A positive critical...
This note provides a corrected version of a representation theorem in population ethics. While it is true that the fixed-population axioms continuity and weak Pareto are sufficient for the existence of an ordering of population-size – representative-utility pairs that can be used to rank social alternatives, we show that, in order to obtain the exi...
This paper proves a new representation theorem for domains with both discrete and continuous variables. The result generalizes Debreu's well-known representation theorem on connected domains. A strengthening of the standard continuity axiom is used in order to guarantee the existence of a representation. A generalization of the main theorem and an...
This article examines several families of population principles in the light of a set of axioms. In addition to the critical-level utilitarian, number-sensitive critical-level utilitarian, and number-dampened utilitarian families and their generalized counterparts, we consider the restricted number-dampened family and introduce two new ones: the re...
Discounting the utilities of future people or giving smaller weights to groups other than one's own is often criticized on the grounds that the resulting objective function differs from the ethically appropriate one. This paper investigates the consequences of changes in the discount rate and weights when they are moved toward the warranted ones. U...
This paper presents and investigates two classes of equivalent-income functions that are generalizations of those that correspond to exact (independent-of-base) absolute and relative equivalence scales. They provide less restrictive household demands, especially for children's goods, and have associated absolute and relative equivalence scales that...
To test the joint hypothesis that players in a noncooperative game (allowing mixtures over pure strategies) consult an independent preference relation and select a Nash equilibrium, it suffices to study the reaction of the revealed collective choice upon changes in the space of strategies available to the players. The joint hypothesis is supported...
We analyze the rationalizability of variable-population social-choice functions in a welfarist framework. It is shown that fixed-population rationalizability and a weakening of congruence together are necessary and su#cient for rational choice, given a plausible dominance property that prevents the choice of alternatives involving low utility level...
This paper illustrates the application of functional-equations results in population ethics. In an intertemporal framework, we provide characterizations of several classes of variablepopulation social orderings that may depend on individual lengths of life in addition to lifetime utilities. The generalized associativity equation turns out to play a...
A version of Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem is established for state-contingent alternatives when the number of states is finite. The consequences of using utility functions that do not have an expected utility functional form to represent the individual and social preferences are also considered.
This paper, which is to be published as a chapter in the Handbook of Social Choice and Welfare, provides a survey of Utilitarianism as a theory of justice. We review and discuss axiomatizations of Utilitarian and Generalized-Utilitarian social-evaluation functionals in a welfarist framework. In addition, we analyze extensions of Utilitarian princip...
Hicks pretendait dans le cadre de l'analyse cout-benefice que la superficie a gauche de la courbe de demande -calculee en supposant que tous les autres marches sont en equilibre- etait egale a la somme des surplus de Dupuit-Marshall sur tous les marches plus le surplus des producteurs. ce papier demontre d'abord dans un modele d'equilibre general q...
We examine the possibilities of extending Sen's taxonomy of fixed-population information assumptions regarding the measurability and interpersonal comparability of individual utilities to social-choice problems where the population may vary. It is shown that in order to avoid impossibility results, informationally more demanding assumptions than in...
A version of Harsanyi's social aggregation theorem is established for state-contingent alternatives when the number of states is finite. The consequences of using utility functions that do not have an expected utility functional form to represent the individual and social preferences are also considered.
This paper analyzes variable-population social-evaluation principles in a framework where outcomes are uncertain. We provide
characterizations of expected-utility versions of critical-level generalized utilitarian rules. These principles evaluate
lotteries over possible states of the world on the basis of the sum of the expected values of differenc...
We show that any quasiordering is the intersection of orderings;Journal of Economic LiteratureClassification Numbers: C60, D00, D60, D71.
It is well-known that there is a trade-off regarding the properties of population principles that are used to make social evaluations when the number of people in the society under consideration may vary. The commonly used principles either lead to the repugnant conclusion (which is the case for classical utilitarianism), or they violate the Pareto...
"This paper investigates birth-date dependent principles for social evaluation in an intertemporal framework in which population size may vary. We weaken the strong Pareto principle in order to allow individuals' birth dates to matter in establishing a social ordering. Using the axiom independence of the utilities of the dead, we characterize popul...
Principles for the social evaluation of states of affairs with different population sizes, such as Classical Utilitarianism, often lead to the repugnant conclusion. Those that avoid it may have other ethically unattractive features. Average Utilitarianism does not lead to the repugnant conclusion but, in some cases, considers the addition of indivi...
We show that any quasiordering is the intersection of orderings.
This note investigates the extension of Roberts' price-independent welfare prescriptions to alternatives in which population size and composition can vary. We show that ethically unsatisfactory orderings result. Suppose that a single person is to be added to a population that is unaffected in utility terms. Either all such additions must be regarde...
Sen's social-evaluation-functional framework is used to reformulate harsanyi's social aggregation problem so that both single-profile and multi-profile issues can be considered with allowance made for different assumption concerning the measurability and comparability of individual utilities. Uncertainty is modelled using state contingent alternati...
We have attempted to demonstrate the the principles in the Critical-Level Utilitarian and Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarian families perform well in providing a reasonable welfarist axiology. They avoid the difficulties of AU and HNU (with have some negative critical levels) and avoid the repugnant conclusion.
This paper concerns the ethical issues that arise when policy decisions have to be taken that affect population size and characteristics. Such policies include social security systems, intertemporal resource allocation decisions, and policies designed to influence fertility rates. The authors provide characterizations of Leximin principles for soci...
Population ethics contains several principles that avoid the repugnant conclusion. These rules rank all possible alternatives, leaving no room for moral ambiguity. Building on a suggestion of Parfit, this paper characterizes principles that provide incomplete but ethically attractive rankings of alternatives with different population sizes. All of...
This paper analyzes a two-period foreign-aid model where assistance can be given in the form of consumption or population-control aid. Population size in period 2 is endogenous. Using the family of ethical principles called critical-level utilitarianism (CLU), we examine the properties of ethically optimal resource allocations. Our results show tha...
On the basis of variable-population considerations, we characterize multi-valued bargaining solutions that are rationalized by special cases of the generalized Gini orderings. In addition to some fixed-population axioms, we use versions of the well-known consistency principle to characterize the single-series Gini bargaining solutions and some of t...
This paper shows that, in a partially welfarist framework that permits discounting, perperiod social evaluations can be consistent with a timeless social ordering only if social principles lead to the repugnant conclusion. The same result applies if per-period social evaluations are replaced by forward-looking evaluations (social orderings that, in...
Welfarist population ethics uses information about the well-being (utilities) of the individuals who are alive in alternative states of affairs to make social evaluations. Most principles that produce orderings of alternative states employ social value functions of those utilities to generate social preferences.2 The most commonly used principles a...
This paper analyzes variable-population social-evaluation principles in a framework where outcomes are uncertain. In a static model, we provide characterizations of expected-utility versions of Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarian rules.
This chapter is about inequality indexes that have an explicit normative interpretation. By this, we mean that there is a relationship between an inequality index and a social-evaluation ordering defined on the incomes — incomes -- nominal or real -- of the members of society.2 Incomes are typically assigned to individuals rather than households by...
This paper considers the problem of social evaluation in a model where population size, individual lifetime utilities, lengths of life, and birth dates vary across states. In an intertemporal framework, the authors investigate principles for social evaluation that allow history to matter to some extent. Using an axiom called independence of the uti...
Hicks pretendait dans le cadre de l'analyse cout-benefice que la superficie a gauche de la courbe de demande -calculee en supposant que tous les autres marches sont en equilibre- etait egale a la somme des surplus de Dupuit-Marshall sur tous les marches plus le surplus des producteurs. ce papier demontre d'abord dans un modele d'equilibre general q...
We show that the weak and strong congruence axioms for consumer demand correspondences are equivalent if there are only two commodities. This result generalizes a well-known analogous equivalence theorem that applies to single-valued demands.
The measurement of household welfare is one of the most compelling yet demanding areas in economics. To place the analysis of inequality and poverty within an economic framework where individuals are making decisions about current and lifetime incomes and expenditures is a difficult task, made all the more challenging by the complexity of the decis...
This paper introduces and characterizes a new class of solutions to cooperative bargaining problems that can be rationalized by generalized Gini orderings defined on the agents' utility gains. Generalized Ginis are orderings that can be represented by quasi-concave, nondecreasing functions that are linear in rank-ordered subspaces of Euclidean spac...
Equivalence Scale Exactness (ESE) or Independence of Base (IB), a condition on household preferences and interpersonal comparisons, makes adult-equivalence scales independent of utility levels. ESE is characterized by Income-Ratio Comparability (IRC) which assumes that utility equality is preserved by income scaling. If ESE/IRC is a maintained hypo...
This note investigates recent claims by Lewbel regarding the use of equivalence scales in welfare analysis and finds them wanting. We go on to show that scaled income (income divided by the equivalence scale of the household) is an ordinal index of household well-being if and only if preferences are homothetic. Furthermore, we show that these scale...
This article investigates the properties, good and bad, of social evaluations based on four money measures of well-being or changes in well-being: compensating variations, money metrics, extended money metrics, and welfare ratios. Consistency of social rankings (transitivity, asymmetry of preference), the possibility of incorporating inequality ave...
Discussions of the morality of animal exploitation must deal with the fact that these activities result in animal populations that would not otherwise exist. In this paper, simple economic models of animal-using food production and research are combined with explicit ethical criteria that are sensitive to animal well-being and numbers. The authors...
We have shown, contrary to the claims of Cowen, that average and critical-level utilitarianism, which do not suffer from the repugnant conclusion, do not recommend the killing of people with low but positive utilities. We have shown, in addition, that Methuselah's paradox and the repugnant conclusion do not stem from preferences that are represente...
In this volume a diverse group of economists, philosophers, political scientists, and psychologists address the problems, principles, and practices involved in comparing the well-being of different individuals. A series of questions lie at the heart of this investigation: What is the relevant concept of well-being for the purposes of comparison? Ho...
For a single household, an economic cost-of-living index compares the minimum expenditure needed to achieve a particular indifference curve under two different price regimes.
This article presents a proof of Arrow’s Theorem which highlights the theorem’s relationship to welfarism and which emphasizes its underlying geometric structure. In addition, this method of proof is adapted to provide a proof of a single-preference-profile version of Arrow’s Theorem. The relationship between Arrovian social choice theory and Bergs...
This paper presents a case against the use of the sum of compensating variations as a cost-benefit test. The authors argue that (1) the ethical judgments implied by the test are not defensible; (2) positive sums of compensating variations occur without potential Pareto improvements, resulting in social preference reversals without simultaneous Scit...
Money metric utility is a particular normalization of a household's utility function, and represents its preferences exactly. The money metric representation is normally not concave; however, this is a desirable property if it is to be used in applied welfare analysis. We show that money metrics are concave for all reference prices if and only if p...
This paper considers the consistency of Arrow's axioms in the choice-theoretic version of his impossibility theorem when natural economic restrictions are placed on individual preferences and on the admissible feasible sets. Both pure public goods and pure private goods environments are considered. It is demonstrated that a social choice correspond...
This paper investigates second-best (transfers in kind) and third-best (subsidies and taxes) Pare to optima in a simple model were government lacks full information ab out consumer types (who is able, who is infirm). These Pareto optima rely on self-selection. The authors show that those second-best Paret o optima which are not also first-best (som...
An argument for “welfarist” social evaluation is presented that replaces the independence axiom with a consistency axiom for social-evaluation functionals in economic environments. This axiom (consistency across dimension or COAD) requires that, if two allocations contain suballocations in common, and if individual utility functions are projected d...
The benefits of nature-based tourism to biodiversity conservation are often presumed but rarely quantified. The relative value placed on attributes of nature parks is unknown, as is the contribution of biodiversity to tourists willingness to visit a particular protected area. We surveyed tourists and foreign residents in Uganda to determine how pre...
In this paper we show that even if consumers' surpluses are known precisely, there are severe difficulties in using them to make consistent social-welfare judgements. In order for the Hicksian surpluses to be used, consumers must face the same prices and preferences must have affine parallel Engel curves. The cost-benefit rule must be the (possibly...
Many applications of economic analysis require social evaluations of alternatives involving different numbers of people. In this paper we use the tools of social-choice theory to provide an axiomatic formulation of this problem. It yields a class of social criteria called ‘critical-level generalized utilitarianism’. This class and its implications...
This paper shows that the discounted sum of instantaneous equivalent or compensating variations (generalized to allow for
expenditure changes) is never an exact welfare indicator for a consumer whose preferences are represented by a continuous,
increasing inter-temporal utility function.
This paper reports on an incentive structure designed to secure productive efficiency in a multi-firm socialist industry where firm managers are reward-maximisers. By assessing managers a bonus / penalty according as their profits are above or below the industry average the system makes the managers play in an n-person constant-sum game. This game,...
This note focuses on some implications of person-specific costs of production, costs of production which are proportional to the number of persons employed. Costs of providing office space, lockers, written instructions, specialized clothing, and on-the-job training are examples of person-specific costs of production. Such costs imply that aggregat...
In this paper we propose a general method for constructing measures (both relative and absolute) of effective tax/benefit progressivity from social-welfare functions. Relative measures compare the after-tax (or benefit) distribution of income with the distribution that would result if the burden were imposed proportionally. Absolute measures use th...
A single-parameter generalization of the Gini coefficient (S-Gini) is presented for income distributions defined in the continuum. Special cases are Dorfman's formula for the Gini, and the authors' S-Ginis for finite populations. We exploit the duality between indices of relative inequality and homothetic social-evaluation functions to construct th...
In this paper we present a normative theory of industrial evaluation. Our framework provides a foundation for the notion of the ‘equivalent number of equal-sized firms’ which is an inverse measure of concentration. From an axiomatic basis we develop a particular functional form for the evaluation of industry performance — a Cobb-Douglas function of...
Suppose that a monopolist's customers can be divided into two groups -- the impatient, who place a relatively high value on their time, and the long-suffering, who place a relatively low value on their time. In this circumstance the monopolist can separate the two submarkets, even when he cannot identify any individual's group membership, by offeri...
We present a new method for measuring inequality among subgroups of a population together with an application to the measurement of wage and salary inequality between the sexes in Canada and its provinces. In the conventional decomposition intergroup inequality is measured as inequality among subgroup means. Our indices are found by extending the u...
This paper generalizes the poverty index introduced by Sen and demonstrates that (i) for every homothetic social evaluation function there is one relative poverty index, (ii) Sen's index is a relative poverty index and corresponds to a Gini social evaluation function, (iii) for every translatable social evaluation function there is one absolute pov...
In this paper we propose a simple definition of economic equality and characterize non- paternalist egalitarian preferences. We compare our definition to the ideas of envy and fairness and extend these ideas to the case of extended benevolent preferences. In productive economies efficiency and equality may conflict, just as do efficiency and the ab...
In most developing countries, income inequality tends to worsen during initial stages of growth, especially in urban areas. The People’s Republic of China (PRC) provides a sharp contrast where income inequality among urban households is lower than that among rural households. In terms of inclusive growth, the existence of income mobility over a lon...