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One of the main objectives of empirical analysis of experiments and quasi‐experiments is to inform policy decisions that determine the allocation of treatments to individuals with different observable covariates. We study the properties and implementation of the Empirical Welfare Maximization (EWM) method, which estimates a treatment assignment policy by maximizing the sample analog of average social welfare over a class of candidate treatment policies. The EWM approach is attractive in terms of both statistical performance and practical implementation in realistic settings of policy design. Common features of these settings include: (i) feasible treatment assignment rules are constrained exogenously for ethical, legislative, or political reasons, (ii) a policy maker wants a simple treatment assignment rule based on one or more eligibility scores in order to reduce the dimensionality of individual observable characteristics, and/or (iii) the proportion of individuals who can receive the treatment is a priori limited due to a budget or a capacity constraint. We show that when the propensity score is known, the average social welfare attained by EWM rules converges at least at n−1/2 rate to the maximum obtainable welfare uniformly over a minimally constrained class of data distributions, and this uniform convergence rate is minimax optimal. We examine how the uniform convergence rate depends on the richness of the class of candidate decision rules, the distribution of conditional treatment effects, and the lack of knowledge of the propensity score. We offer easily implementable algorithms for computing the EWM rule and an application using experimental data from the National JTPA Study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I estimate a search-and-bargaining model of a decentralized market to quantify the effects of trading frictions on asset allocations, asset prices, and welfare, and to quantify the effects of intermediaries that facilitate trade. Using business-aircraft data, I find that, relative to the Walrasian benchmark, 18.3 percent of the assets are misallocated; prices are 19.2 percent lower; and the aggregate welfare losses equal 23.9 percent. Dealers play an important role in reducing trading frictions: In a market with no dealers, a larger fraction of assets would be misallocated, and prices would be higher. However, dealers reduce aggregate welfare because their operations are costly, and they impose a negative externality by decreasing the number of agents' direct transactions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual heterogeneity is an important source of variation in demand. Allowing for general heterogeneity is needed for correct welfare comparisons. We consider general heterogeneous demand where preferences and linear budget sets are statistically independent. Only the marginal distribution of demand for each price and income is identified from cross-section data where only one price and income is observed for each individual. Thus, objects that depend on varying price and/or income for an individual are not generally identified, including average exact consumer surplus. We use bounds on income effects to derive relatively simple bounds on the average surplus, including for discrete/continuous choice. We also sketch an approach to bounding surplus that does not use income effect bounds. We apply the results to gasoline demand. We find tight bounds for average surplus in this application, but wider bounds for average deadweight loss. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider empirical measurement of equivalent variation (EV) and compensating variation (CV) resulting from price change of a discrete good using individual-level data when there is unobserved heterogeneity in preferences. We show that for binary and unordered multinomial choice, the marginal distributions of EV and CV can be expressed as simple closed-form functionals of conditional choice probabilities under essentially unrestricted preference distributions. These results hold even when the distribution and dimension of unobserved heterogeneity are neither known nor identified, and utilities are neither quasilinear nor parametrically specified. The welfare distributions take simple forms that are easy to compute in applications. In particular, average EV for a price rise equals the change in average Marshallian consumer surplus and is smaller than average CV for a normal good. These nonparametric point-identification results fail for ordered choice if the unit price is identical for all alternatives, thereby providing a connection to Hausman-Newey's (2014) partial identification results for the limiting case of continuous choice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We solve for the equilibrium dynamics of information sharing in a large population. Each agent is endowed with signals regarding the likely outcome of a random variable of common concern. Individuals choose the effort with which they search for others from whom they can gather additional information. When two agents meet, they share their information. The information gathered is further shared at subsequent meetings, and so on. Equilibria exist in which agents search maximally until they acquire sufficient information precision and then search minimally. A tax whose proceeds are used to subsidize the costs of search improves information sharing and can, in some cases, increase welfare. On the other hand, endowing agents with public signals reduces in- formation sharing and can, in some cases, decrease welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study how to evaluate allocations independently of individual preferences over unavailable commodities. We prove impossibility results that suggest that such evaluations encounter serious difficulties. This is related to the well known problem of performing international comparisons of standard of living across countries with different consumption goods. We show how possibility results can be retrieved with restrictions on the domain of preferences, on the application of the independence axiom, or on the set of allocations to be ranked. Such restrictions appear more plausible when the objects of evaluation are allocations of composite commodities, characteristics, or human functionings rather than ordinary commodities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper analyzes equilibrium and welfare for a tractable class of economies (games) that have externalities, strategic complementarity or substitutability, and heterogeneous information. First, we characterize the equilibrium use of information: complementarity heightens the sensitivity of equilibrium actions to public information, raising aggregate volatility, whereas substitutability heightens the sensitivity to private information, raising cross-sectional dispersion. Next, we define and characterize an efficiency benchmark designed to address whether the equilibrium use of information is optimal from a social perspective; the efficient use of information reflects the social value of aligning choices across agents. Finally, we examine the comparative statics of equilibrium welfare with respect to the information structure; the social value of information is best understood by classifying economies according to the inefficiency, if any, in the equilibrium use of information. We conclude with a few applications, including production externalities, beauty contests, business cycles, and large Cournot and Bertrand games. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we generalize the notion of Pareto efficiency to make it applicable to environments with endogenous populations. Two efficiency concepts are proposed: 79- efficiency and A-efficiency. The two concepts differ in how they treat potential agents that are not born. We show that these concepts are closely related to the notion of Pareto efficiency when fertility is exogenous. We prove a version of the first welfare theorem for Barro--Becker type fertility choice models and discuss how this result can be generalized. Finally, we study examples of equilibrium settings in which fertility decisions are not efficient, and we classify them into settings where inefficiencies arise inside the family and settings where they arise across families. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides an analysis of the asymptotic properties of Pareto optimal consumption allocations in a stochastic general equilibrium model with heterogeneous consumers. In particular, we investigate the market selection hypothesis that markets favor traders with more accurate beliefs. We show that in any Pareto-optimal allocation whether each consumer vanishes or survives is determined entirely by discount factors and beliefs. Whereas equilibrium allocations in economies with complete markets are Pareto optimal, our results characterize the limit behavior of these economies. We show that, all else equal, the market selects for consumers who use Bayesian learning with the truth in the support of their prior and selects among Bayesians according to the size of their parameter space. Finally, we show that in economies with incomplete markets, these conclusions may not hold. With incomplete markets, payoff functions can matter for long-run survival, and the market selection hypothesis fails. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the Self Sufficiency Project (SSP) welfare demonstration, members of a randomly assigned treatment group could receive a subsidy for full-time work. The subsidy was available for 3 years, but only to people who began working full time within 12 months of random assignment. A simple optimizing model suggests that the eligibility rules created an "establishment" incentive to find a job and leave welfare within a year of random assignment, and an "entitlement" incentive to choose work over welfare once eligibility was established. Building on this insight, we develop an econometric model of welfare participation that allows us to separate the two effects and estimate the impact of the earnings subsidy on welfare entry and exit rates among those who achieved eligibility. The combination of the two incentives explains the time profile of the experimental impacts, which peaked 15 months after random assignment and faded relatively quickly. Our findings suggest that about half of the peak impact of SSP was attributable to the establishment incentive. Despite the extra work effort generated by SSP, the program had no lasting impact on wages and little or no long-run effect on welfare participation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I consider a dynamic economy in which a government needs to finance a stochastic process of purchases. The agents in the economy are privately informed about their skills, which evolve stochastically over time; I impose no restriction on the stochastic evolution of skills. I construct a tax system that implements a symmetric con- strained Pareto optimal allocation. The tax system is constrained to be linear in an agent's wealth, but can be arbitrarily nonlinear in his current and past labor incomes. I find that wealth taxes in a given period depend on the individual's labor income in that period and previous ones. However, in any period, the expectation of an agent's wealth tax rate in the following period is zero. As well, the government never collects any net revenue from wealth taxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It has been known that, in aggregating infinite utility streams, there does not exist any social welfare function, which satisfies the axioms of Pareto, intergenerational equity, and continuity. We show that the impossibility result persists even without imposing the continuity axiom, and in frameworks allowing for more general domains of utilities than those used in the existing literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine a general equilibrium model with asymmetrically informed agents. The presence of asymmetric information generally presents a conflict between incentive compatibility and Pareto efficiency. We present a notion of informational size and show that the conflict between incentive compatibility and efficiency can be made arbitrarily small if agents are of sufficiently small informational size. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on various seminars as of July 2002. The third international conference on public economics of the Association for Public Economic Theory, will be held in Paris on July 3-6, 2002. Themes of the conference include: Taxation, externalities and public goods; Environment; Theory of games and public economics; New technologies, development, and political economics; Cooperation, group formation, and communication; Decision theory and public economics; International cooperation and globalization; Public finance; Financial policies and the banking system. The sixth international meeting of the Society for Social Choice and Welfare will be held from July 11-14, 2002 at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena California. The tenth international conference on Panel Data will be held at the Academy of Science, Berlin, on July 5-6, 2002, organized by the German Socio-Economic Panel Group at the DIW, Berlin. The aim of this conference is to bring together economists, econometricians, statisticians, and social scientists who are interested in or are working on panel data issues.

The article focuses welfare rankings in the presence of contaminated data. Ranking theorems based on concepts of stochastic dominance are fundamental to the analysis of income distributions as well as to finance theory and other aspects of the theory of choice under uncertainty. As abstract theoretical constructs they provide a connection between the philosophical basis of welfare judgments and elementary statistical tools for describing distributions. In practical applications they suggest useful ways in which simple computational procedures may be used to draw inferences from collections of empirical income distributions. However, formal welfare propositions can only be satisfactorily invoked for empirical constructs if sample data can be taken as a reasonable representation of the underlying income distributions that we want to compare. The article specifies explicit objective function such as a utility function or social-welfare function: this has the attraction of simplicity but is rather restrictive. The second approach involves specifying a class of measures of dispersion, and using information about dispersion and mean income jointly to draw conclusions about welfare: but this runs into a class of problems that arise in connection with the estimation of inequality measures and other measures of dispersion.

Do political institutions shape economic policy? I argue that this question should naturally appeal to economists. Moreover, the answer is in the affirmative, both in theory and in practice. In particular, recent theoretical work predicts systematic effects of electoral rules and political regimes on the size and composition of government spending. Results from ongoing empirical work indicate that such effects are indeed present in the data. Some empirical results are consistent with theoretical predictions: presidential regimes have smaller governments and countries with majoritarian elections have smaller welfare- state programs and less corruption. Other results present puzzles for future research: the adjustment to economic events appears highly institution dependent, as does the timing and nature of the electoral cycle. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We consider the allocation of goods in exchange economies with a finite number of agents who may have private information about their preferences. In such a setting, standard allocation rules such as Walrasian equilibria or rational expectations equilibria are not compatible with individual incentives. We characterize the set of allocation rules which are incentive compatible, or in other words, the set of strategy-proof social choice functions. Social choice functions which are strategy-proof are those which can be obtained from trading according to a finite number of pre-specified proportions. The number of proportions which can be accommodated is proportional to the number of agents. Such rules are necessarily inefficient, even in the limit as the economy grows. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is shown that any informationally decentralized mechanism that realizes fair allocations over the class of classical pure exchange environments has a message space of dimension no smaller than the number of agents times the number of commodities. Since the equal income Walrasian mechanism, in which all agents take prices parametrically and maximize utility subject to the average income constraint, realizes fair outcomes over the class of classical pure exchange environments and has a message space of that dimension it is informationally efficient. Further, it is shown that it is the unique informationally efficient mechanism realizing fair allocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the application of the second theorem of welfare economics for exchange economics with nonconvex preferences. Allocation of Pareto Optimal as Walrasian equilibria; Advantages of income redistribution of the government; Outcome of nonmarket intervention of the government.

In an economy with one public and one private good, egalitarian-equivalent cost sharing consists of finding the highest public good level x* such that consuming x* for free yields a feasible utility distribution. The corresponding feasible allocation (typically unique), called egalitarian-equivalent, is in the core of the economy. Conversely, any cost sharing method satisfying: (i) Pareto optimality, (ii) cost monotonicity (nobody suffers a utility loss if the production technology improves upon, ceteris paribus), and (iii) individual rationality (no single agent coalition objects) or (iii') no private transfers (no agent receives a positive amount of private good), must select an egalitarian-equivalent allocation in every economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A collective choice problem involves a set of agents and a set of feasible utility vectors. A solution is a (collective) choice function that assigns to each element in a family of admissible collective choice problems a unique feasible utility allocation. Our concern here is with solutions that are collectively rational, i.e. for which there exists an ordering of utility space such that the solution outcome to each choice problem is obtained as the maximal element of that ordering on the set of feasible utility allocations. An axiom due to Harsanyi, called bilateral stability, is used to obtain the following integrability result: Any solution satisfying Pareto optimality, continuity and bilateral stability can be represented by an additively separable Bergson-Samuelson social welfare function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article studies a class of evaluative statistics for measurement and decomposition of multi-dimensional inequality and their corresponding social welfare functions. The properties of the generalized entropy family of measures are derived. This class contains many of the popular measures, including both of H. Theil's information measures and those which are ordinarily equivalent to the class of measures proposed by A.B. Atkinson. In the proposed approach, an individual unit is first represented by a utility-like function of all the attributes received.

We extend the principal-agent framework with risk-neutral principals to situations in which several principals simultaneously and independently attempt to influence a common agent. We show that implementation is, in the aggregate, always efficient (cost-minimizing), and that noncooperative behavior induces an efficient (potentially second-best) action choice if and only if collusion among the principals would implement the first-best action at the first-best level of cost. We also investigate the existence of equilibria, the distribution of net rewards among principals, the characteristics of actions chosen in inefficient equilibria, and potential institutional remedies for welfare losses induced by noncooperative behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers stochastic social choice rules which, for every feasible set of alternatives and every profile of individual orderings, specify social choice probabilities for the feasible alternatives. It is shown that if such a stochastic social choice rule satisfies (1900): (i) a probabilistic counterpart of Arrow's independence of irrelevant alternatives, (ii) ex-post Pareto optimality, and (iii) "regularity" (a "rationality" property postulating that given the individual preference orderings, if the feasible set of alternatives is expanded, then the social choice probability for an initially feasible alternative cannot increase), then the power structure under it is almost completely characterized by weighted random dictatorship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Simultaneous bargaining over more issues by two bargainers is treated by taking sums of bargaining games and requiring bargaining solutions to satisfy certain (super-) additivity axioms. A (new) characterization of a family of so-called proportional solutions is given with the aid of three axioms: (partial) superadditivity, homogeneity, and weak Pareto optimality. Requiring, besides individual rationality and Pareto continuity, the axioms of restricted additivity, scale transformation invariance, and Pareto optimality, yields an alternative characterization of a family of solutions consisting of all nonsymmetric extensions of Nash's solution. Also these solutions exhibit a (limited) proportionality property. Further, the relation with the Super-Additive solution of Perles and Maschler is discussed, and also the link with Myerson's results on proportional and utilitarian solutions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the program of the 1984 Australasian Meetings of the Econometric Society which was held at the University of Sydney in New South Wales on August 23-25. The members of the program committee were Alan Woodland, Viv Hall, Dilip Madan, John Goodgew, Nanak Kakwani, Robert Bartels and Denzil Fiebig. Some of the topics discussed were asset pricing models; welfare economics; labor unions; international trade; employment subsidies; business cycles; small economies, pricing and analysis of household expenditures.

The article argues that equal sharing of cooperative surplus, perhaps the simplest notion of microeconomic justice, is hardly operational. Interpersonal comparisons of welfare increments are impossible without an objective numeraire. The axiomatically egalitarianism, utilitarianism, and, in general, the class of equal sharing above a convex decision (ESCD) social choice functions, are characterized in the quasi-linear context. Both the egalitarian and the ESCD social choice functions are illustrated in a particular case of a binary public decisions and defined with full generality.

This paper considers a repeated principal agent relationship where the principal is risk neutral, the agent is risk averse, the principal can borrow or save at a fixed interest rate, and the agent discounts future consumption. It is shown that memory plays a very strong role in every Pareto-optimal contract. Sufficient conditions for Pareto-optimal contracts to exhibit rising or falling wages are identified. Finally, it is shown that the restriction of the agent's access to credit is necessary to achieve a Pareto-optimal outcome. In particular, under every Pareto-optimal contract for every outcome of every period the agent would choose to save some of his wage if he could. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article extends the Turnovsky, Shalit, and Schmitz (T-S-S) and Newbery-Stiglitz analysis of the effects of commodity price stabilization on an individual consumer's welfare. It also compares partial price stabilization policies that affect multiple prices in non-mean preserving ways. The approach of T-S-S provides useful information about an individual's preference for or against price but failed to provide information about a group of heterogeneous consumers' preference for price stability. Newbery and Stiglitz have used stochastic dominance rules to examine mean preserving partial price stabilization schemes.

Much attention has been devoted recently to the problem of implementing an optimal provision of public goods with imperfect information about preferences. The literature studies mechanisms with individual agents directly revealing information about their preferences, and focuses on two types of truthful equilibria: dominant strategy and Bayesian-Nash. We introduce "Stackelberg" mechanisms with truth-telling a dominant strategy for all agents but the first. The first agent plays "before" the others maximizing his expected utility on the assumption that others will reveal their true preferences. We present sufficient conditions for the construction of Stackelberg mechanisms which yield an efficient provision of public goods, balance the budget, and induce every participant to reveal their true preferences. These results strengthen and extend the known results of the Bayesian-Nash approach. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question of nonmyopic strategic behavior in an MDP planning procedure which is terminated when the rate of adjustment in the quantity of the public good is below some prespecified threshold. The problem is formulated as a dynamic game in which utility functions are additively separable. It is shown that the game possesses perfect Nash equilibria whose outcomes are Pareto optima. Moreover, any individually rational Pareto optimum can be attained through one of these Nash equilibria. Strategies in these equilibria involve a rate of revision in the quantity of the public good that is equal to the threshold level and insures monotonic convergence of the procedure in finite time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the extent to which standard, general equilibrium analysis of Pareto optima and of competitive equilibria can be applied to environments with moral hazard and adverse selection problems. Allowing for lotteries, contracts with random components, we first establish that an adverse-selection insurance economy, a moral-hazard insurance economy, a signaling economy, and a private-information labor market economy are all special cases of a simple, general structure. We then show that techniques for characterizing Pareto optimal contracts as solutions to concave programming problems are useful and nice and appear to be broadly applicable; allowing for lotteries, we show how to characterize the optimal allocations for the adverse-selection insurance and labor market economies. We then show that standard existence and optimality theorems for competitive equilibria apply in the linear space containing lotteries if agents with characteristics which are distinct and privately observed at the time of initial trading enter the economy-wide resource constraints in a homogeneous way (other kinds of diversity are not critical). For economies with moral hazard which satisfy the homogeneity condition, competitive con- tract markets single out a subset of the optima and thus can be consistent with apparent unemployment and with a random allocation of labor supplied though all households are averse to risk. The adverse-selection insurance and signaling economies, however, do not satisfy the homogeneity condition and are difficult to decentralize efficiently with a price system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Compares the concepts of efficiency for economies with incomplete information. Stages at which individual's welfare is evaluated; Rejection of incentive-compatible decision rule by individuals in the economy; Details of the durable decision rules.

This paper explores the possibilities opened up by combining preference aggregation and randomization in passing from individual to collective judgements about alternatives. We study the distribution of power under functions which assign to each profile of individual preferences a probabilistic judgement on each pair of alternatives x, y, that is, a probability of x being considered socially at least as good as y. Conditions are described under which the power of coalitions to guarantee that an alternative is not declared worse than another is subadditive, while their power to guarantee that one alternative is declared better than another is superadditive. These results extend some of the main findings on the structure of decisive coalitions under deterministic social choice rules. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper develops a framework of analysis for studying the informational properties of a certain class of "parametric" resource allocation processes. It is shown that the Taylor process (related to certain ideas for planning in the so-called socialist economies as put forward by Taylor) is informationally efficient in the sense that any informationally decentralized resource allocation process which has similar (static) properties (Pareto optimality) must use a message space which is dimensionally at least as large as that of the Taylor process. We also show that in general greater informational decentralization can be achieved through parametric than through "nonparametric" processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An exchange economy is considered in which there are a finite number of individuals, the same number of indivisibles, and a fixed amount of a divisible good. Each individual consumes exactly one of the indivisibles and a certain quantity of the divisible good. The existence of prices corresponding to Pareto-efficient allocations is proved. It is also shown that this economy possesses fair allocations, income-fair allocations, coalition-fair allocations, and Pareto-efficient egalitarian-equivalent allocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper considers a world in which one public good is financed by commodity taxes. It concentrates on the global study of the set of tax equilibria (corresponding to any possible taxation scheme). In particular conditions for "regularity" and connectedness of this set are exhibited. Consequences obtain both for the positive theory of tax incidence in general equilibrium (existence, continuity, uniqueness) and for normative theory ("regularity" of optimal solutions, algorithms of tax reform …). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the effect of costs of adjustment on the dynamic characteristics of intra-urban resource allocation. The analysis is concentrated on the development pattern of an open city within a system of many cities both in steady-state and in variable-state economies. Competitive equilibrium of the urban system as a whole is also discussed and compared to Pareto optimum allocation. Some of the results that characterize the resource allocation under static analysis are reestablished for the dynamic case as well. But others that follow from comparative statics are shown to be incorrect under the dynamic analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper establishes a natural and satisfying characterization of the class of collective choice rules which are acyclic and satisfy the Arrow axioms (unrestricted domain, independence of irrelevant alternatives, and the weak Pareto principle). We show that, when the number of alternatives is larger than the number of individuals, there must exist an individual who can "veto" at least some critical number of pairwise decisions. This critical number of veto pairs depends on the number of alternatives and individuals, and, as the number of alternatives increases without limit, the traction of all pairs which some individual can veto approaches unity. We also present a global veto theorem and an axiomatic characterization of the Pareto extension rule which utilizes acyclicity rather than quasi-transitivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An allocation is said to be t-wise optimal (for s a positive integer) if for every collection of t traders, there is no reallocation of their current holdings that will make some better off while making none worse off. The allocation is pairwise optimal if it is I-wise optimal for t = 2. A t-wise optimal allocation is the outcome of a trading process more decentralized than that of the Walrasian equilibrium. It represents the result of a variety of separate transactions in small groups without the (centralized) coordination provided by a single Walrasian auctioneer. Necessary conditions and sufficient conditions on allocations for t-wise optimality to imply Pareto optimality are developed. These generally require sufficient overlap in goods holdings among traders to ensure the presence of common support prices. This is formalized as indecomposability of a truncated submatrix of the allocation matrix. A necessary and sufficient condition remains an open question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper focuses on a theoretical issue involved in modeling the functioning of a centrally planned economy. Results derived in a model of inventory behavior indicate that the uncertain consequences of economic decisions and their cumulative impact on the functioning of the economy need to be explicitly recognized in order to study plan implementation. When this is done the need for institutions or procedures with homeostatic properties, i.e., negative feedback mechanisms, is revealed. Without such mechanisms orders consistent with a feasible plan may be unable to insure implementation of that plan even when all economic agents are perfectly motivated. Three types of feedback mechanisms resolving this difficulty are formulated and discussed with respect to inventory behavior in a centrally planned economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Noncooperative strategic behaviors are studied in the Malinvaud-Drèze-de Ia Vallée Poussin decentralized planning procedure. We depart from the assumption of myopic behavior by assuming that every agent takes into account the effect over a given period of time [0, T] of his answers to the Center. One shows that, for T large, every Nash equilibrium of the ensuing game in intertemporal strategies approaches: (i) a competitive equilibrium in an exchange economy, and (ii) a Lindahl equilibrium in an economy with public goods. Thus, the Center loses any significant influence on the income distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article investigates the outcome function guaranteeing the optimality of public choice. Game forms implementing weakly Pareto allocations are characterized and a condition ensuring the existence of a Nash equilibrium for every conceivable profile is discussed. It also examines an anonymous outcome function constructed by Hurwicz and Schmeidler guaranteeing the existence of Nash equilibrium for every conceivable profile of preferences over a finite set of alternatives and the Pareto optimality of each such Nash equilibrium.

This paper extends the conclusions obtained by Stiglitz and others about the asymptotic wealth distribution in the neo-classical growth model when the saving function is convex. It is shown not only that locally stable two-class unegalitarian equilibria may exist along with the egalitarian equilibrium, but also that they necessarily are Pareto superior to it. More generally, the paper also analyzes the class of Pareto optimal unegalitarian equilibria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the possibility of a "trade-off" between the two types of assumptions in order to extend both results to the case of "moderate" structural and "moderate" ethical restrictions by strengthening the mild condition and relaxing the harsh ones. It also deals with l-monotone social decision functions and the veto. In proving that a dictator assumed that a social function transformed sets of individual orderings into social orderings. An ordering is not necessary for the existence of maximal elements.

The article explains that one of the four well known axioms involved in John Nash's solution to bargaining problems, the invariance axiom, can be weakened so as to allow compatibility. The choice rule resulting from such a procedure is the equal weight utilitarian choice rule. Meanwhile, when the symmetry axiom is relaxed, utilitarian rules with arbitrary weights result. This characterization of utilitarianism demonstrates the intimate relationship between social choice theory and bargaining theory.

Two theorems are derived about social choice functions, which are defined on comprehensive convex subsets of utility allocation space. Theorem 1 asserts that a linearity condition, together with Pareto optimality, implies that a social choice function must be utilitarian. Theorem 2 asserts that a concavity condition, together with Pareto optimality and independence of irrelevant alternatives, implies that a social choice function must be either utilitarian or egalitarian. These linearity and concavity conditions have natural interpretations in terms of the timing of social welfare analysis (before or after the resolution of uncertainties) and its impact on social choices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demonstrates how the conventional methods of applied welfare economics can be modified to handle such cases in which discrete choices are involved. Review of the computation of the Hicksian compensated variation; Application of the computations to circumstances in which discrete choice is involved; Extension of the results to quality changes.