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In the context of strategic interactions, individuals sometimes find themselves better off when they have fewer options. This mechanism is known under the name of 'strategic commitment', as it is usually the individuals themselves who 'commit' to following a certain course of action by restricting their options; but that is not necessary. I explain how a paternalistic intervention may be conceived where it is a third party who paternalistically restricts rational individuals' choices to improve their welfare. This kind of intervention, which I call 'strategic paternalism', contradicts the narrative according to which welfare economics is incompatible with paternalism because it assumes individual rationality, which would make paternalism irrelevant. To prove this point, I show why and in what sense this 'strategic paternalism' deserves to be called that way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The monstrous pendulum of inequality in the twenty-first century swings sideways amid welfare economics and egalitarianism. Horizontal inequalities embodied by pro-poor policy on grounds such as gender, race, and disability, have long been core international human rights concerns. Yet, gross inequalities in economic status, nationally and globally, are still poorly conceptualized by legal scholars, policymakers, and practitioners. In search of a policy lever, this Article argues that as far as economic theory goes, neither theoretical nor empirical economic research adequately correlates economic inequalities and growth. That is, beyond horizontal inequalities concerning the extreme poor. As economic research remains inept in offering efficiency policy justifications, international human rights law, as the primary legal alternative for poverty-related social justice, could fill the gap. In the backdrop of neoliberal welfare economic policy confines, vertical inequalities between societal groups and global inequalities between countries substantively add to a novel realization of human rights and the achievement of United Nations-led sustainable development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When determining the optimal deductible level for an insurance policy, a policyholder faces two limitations. First, uncertainty arises from the randomness of future losses. Second, the opacity of the functional forms of the policyholder's loss distribution and utility function contributes to additional limitations. While the academic literature focuses on the former, we additionally include limited information on these functional forms in our model setting to reflect real-world decision-making. That is, we draw on an expected utility framework and analyze the relationship between optimal deductible levels under limited and full information. We also derive several decision rules under limited information in order to approximate the optimal deductible level under full information. To support real-world decision-making, these rules could be easily implemented in an online decision aid offered by an insurance broker, a comparison portal for insurance contracts or a consumer protection agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using measures rooted in welfare economics, this article quantifies the economic consequences arising from occupational segregation by gender and migration status in twelve European countries. We also identify the most inclusive European labor markets by building counterfactual distributions. In particular, we remove cross-country differences in immigrants' origin, years of residence, and education, thus determining the contribution that these variables make to the geographical disparities. Our results reveal that the economic consequences of segregation are negative for most foreign workers, especially for immigrant women in Italy, Spain, Germany, and Slovenia. Portugal emerges as a reference point because immigrant workers have a better position compared to other countries, which does not seem to arise from their basic individual characteristics. Our analysis highlights the importance of policy actions aimed at improving the occupational sorting of immigrant workers, such as investing in skills development, avoiding occupational downgrading, and incorporating a gender perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this personal memoir of my lifelong collaborator and friend, Herb Gintis, I reflect on his "A Radical Analysis of Welfare Economics and Individual Development." Published in the Quarterly Journal of Economics in 1972, the article advances a novel Marx-inspired interpretation of the societal origins of preferences, one that profoundly influenced the ideas of a group of like-minded young economists at Harvard at the time, economics more broadly, and Herb and my subsequent joint work. JEL Classification: B14, B21, D01 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioural welfare economics has lately been challenged on account of its use of the satisfaction of true preferences as a normative criterion. The critique contests what is taken to be an implicit assumption in the literature, namely that true preferences are context-independent. This assumption is considered not only unjustified in the behavioural welfare economics literature but unjustifiable – true preferences are argued to be, at least sometimes, context-dependent. This article explores the implications of this 'critique of the inner rational agent'. I argue that the critique does not support a wholesale shift away from the use of true preferences as an evaluative standard in normative economics; instead, the critique implies that behavioural welfare economists need to inquire into and establish the 'source' of particular context-dependent choices in individuals' decision-making. The source determines the permissibility of correcting individuals' context-dependent choices and can, in some situations, support decisive welfare judgements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by the quality of sources rather than their representativeness, the history of English agriculture has been written primarily from the perspective of well-documented large farms to the neglect of smallholders and cottagers who for centuries cultivated the greater part of the nation's farmland but left scant records. The superb series recording the mediocre and low crop yields of the expansive demesnes of great lords has long been adopted for the productivity of all medieval England's arable and is deeply embedded in economic and social histories and calculations of economic growth and the welfare of the population. Yet no convincing justification for this supposition has ever been made, and an increasing flow of research and analysis indicates that the productivity of land varied markedly in accordance with the size and function of farms, with the output per acre of large farms constrained by the need to control costs in order to sell surpluses at a profit, while smallholders, at the cost of low and frequently abysmal labour productivity, produced higher yields by striving to maximize output using abundant family labour to secure subsistence from meagre acreages. An appraisal of farming across the centuries and the continents from the Middle Ages to modern times clearly shows that an inverse relationship generally prevailed between farm size and land productivity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral welfare economics usually aims at mere means paternalism, helping agents better pursue their own goals. This paper discusses one initially promising way to inform policies addressed at agents who violate expected utility theory (EUT), namely what I call "CPT debiasing." I argue that this approach is problematic even if we grant the normative authority of EUT, the descriptive adequacy of CPT (cumulative prospect theory), and the general acceptability of means paternalism. First, it is doubtful whether the CPT utility function measures what its proponents intend. Second, by imposing risk neutrality on agents, the approach involves a more problematic paternalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The access of rural societies to welfare opportunities and resources is at the core of policy and research agendas. The persistent ruralurban gap increases the risks of exclusion and is a challenge that rural dwellers tackle by bolstering their mobility to access labour markets, resources and services. The car has become a vector in the connections and transformations that sustain rural life; however, this mobility is also a source of new fractures in social and territorial cohesion. This paper explores how the rural mobility system has been shaped and analyses its impact on these societies. The results suggest integrating the issue of mobility into rural policies from a more complex sociological perspective, addressing demographic challenges, regional development and territorial cohesion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the two most recent extended manifestos on Europe (2019) of the French populist radical right party Rassemblement National (RN), previously known as the Front National (FN), from a narrative perspective. The perspective used is based on the Narrative Policy Framework's focus on the setting, plot, characters and moral of the narrative combined with a generic approach. Rather than the 'classical' genres of tragedy, comedy, romance and satire, however, this study focuses on the narrative elements of the dystopian genre, and argues that the RN's narrative on Europe broadly resembles fictional dystopian narratives. In dystopian narratives, the inhabitants find their ontological security threatened by a dehumanising, authoritarian regime, in this case the EU. It is in the 'green world', a timeless space outside the limits of the dystopian state, here represented by the RN's proposed European Alliance of Nations, where the dystopian hero recuperates their sense of autonomy and identity. Such narratives, through exacerbating an already widespread sense of anxiety and ontological insecurity, are potentially powerful attempts to frame continued membership in an unreformed EU as a threat to security. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I criticize two features of the new book by Richard Markovits. One is the notion that ethics or moral judgments should be part of our analysis of antitrust. The other is the notion that market definition is incoherent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Richard Markovits' Welfare Economics and Antitrust Policy is, without a doubt, the most expansive and thoughtful effort to assess antitrust policy from the point of view of welfare economics. Unfortunately, I cannot comment in a meaningful way on the specifics of his analysis because after teaching antitrust for 30 years, I have become a nonbeliever. I do not believe any interpretation of today's general antitrust policies, or the economics on which they are based, can be reconciled with any known version of "welfare." The principal reason for this state of affairs is that antitrust scholars and courts cling to goals that are misguided and theories that have not evolved despite an avalanche of information now available that strongly suggests, if not proves, that there is little connection between standard antitrust goals and welfare. Thus, with great reluctance, I question whether the analysis found in Richard's Welfare Economics and Antitrust Policy is worth the effort or ultimately gets us anywhere. My inkling is that Richard realizes this too. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This Article summarizes the most salient components of my study WELFARE ECONOMICS AND ANTITRUST POLICY. It (1) distinguishes moral-rights (justice) analysis from moral-good analysis, (2) defines and examines the relevant extensions of the liberal conception of justice, (3) defines various egalitarian conceptions of the moral good and argues that libertarianism is not morally defensible and would not in any event have many of the extensions some claim it has, (4) defines various categories of antitrust-policy-coverable conduct (including natural and contrived oligopolistic conduct of various sorts and predatory conduct of various sorts), (5) defines the components of the gap between a product's price and marginal cost that need to be distinguished respectively in individualized-pricing and across-the-board-pricing situations, (6) defines "investment competition" and identifies the determinants of its intensity, (7) explains why markets cannot be defined non-arbitrarily, (8) defines "the impact of a choice on economic efficiency" and lists various categories of economic inefficiency that can be generated, (9) delineates the protocol for predicting the economic efficiency of a choice that is ex ante economically efficient (which considers the impact of choices on many categories of economic inefficiency that conventional analyses ignore, takes economically efficient account of the fact that the individual exemplars of Pareto imperfections that would cause economic inefficiency in an otherwise-Pareto-perfect economy can counteract as well as compound each other's misallocative tendencies, and considers how to take appropriate account of the fact that both analysis and its financing are allocative-costly), (10) examines the policy-relevance of a choice's impact on economic efficiency, and (11) executes some preliminary antitrust-policy analyses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to examine whether the cross-country and gender variations of entrepreneurship can be explained within the institutional framework. The study addresses normative forces to which entrepreneurs are expected to adapt within European welfare states. The normative forces are focused on norm-based factors of governmental quality and value-based factors of governmental generosity, which are both hypothesized to be associated with entrepreneurship at the level of society and furthermore from the gender perspective. To verify our hypotheses, the research was conducted among 28 European countries in the years 2012 to 2018. We adopted the macro-level of analysis and undertook panel data analysis (PDA). We estimated the econometric models with entrepreneurship rates as dependent variables and those with norm-based and value-based factors as independent variables. The results confirm that norm-based factors are associated with entrepreneurship and there are significant differences in the responses of female and male entrepreneurial activities to the quality of government. However, we did not find supporting evidence for the statistically significant impact of governmental generosity on entrepreneurship. The novelty of our research is in implementing institutional theory into the discussion on entrepreneurship from the welfare state perspective, by introducing the concept of norm-based and value-based factors which reflect the quality and generosity of the government. We also distinguish between the impact of governmental quality and generosity on entrepreneurship from the gender perspective to contribute to the discussion on the gender gap in entrepreneurship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a theses on social welfare and social justice by Professor Amartya Sen with a focus on the consequences of the Arrow Impossibility Theorem for Welfare Economics and Common good. The article also focuses on the rule of the respect of Private Property and constitutional arrangements for equality of free markets and contracts in Spanish labor market.

Public expenditure theory is a late-comer to the field of public finance, despite laments over the lack of such a theory dating to the late 1800s. This paper documents and attempts to explain this transformation, locating its origins in Richard Musgrave's normative theory of the public household and the adoption by subsequent thinkers of new developments in welfare theory, which was seen to offer a theoretically sophisticated a vision of the state's role as a response to the problem of market failure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The papers in this issue deal with the transformation from public finance to public economics at a theoretical and philosophical level in the mid-twentieth century. Our introduction situates these papers within their intellectual context. To do so, we provide a broad outline of the trajectory of the field beginning with the transformation of welfare economics. Acknowledging the structuring role of Richard Musgrave and James Buchanan for the field, the papers highlight the key role also played by Paul Samuelson in the transition to public economics. Moreover, they underscore how ethical issues were formalised into normative economics at this critical juncture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Soon after the publication of A Theory of Justice, Rawls found himself swept up in the huge wave of enthusiasm his work had elicited from economists, while also having to respond to major critiques. Among the latter we find a largely unknown piece by Samuelson, a giant in the world of economics, devoted to a central question of Rawls's framework, namely the maximin, which he supplemented with several virulent letters strongly attacking Rawls's notions of justice or fairness. A few years later, in a paper written in response to Arrow's 1985 Tanner Lectures, Samuelson would dedicate a section to "Rawls's Gratuitism," caustically remarking that "if something true by definition is a 'truism,' then we may perhaps call something gratuitous a 'gratuitism'." Focusing on the dialogue between Rawls and Samuelson after A Theory of Justice, paying special attention to their correspondence, the paper aims to shed light on the reasons for Samuelson's furore against Rawls's maximin, and to draw some lessons concerning the complex dialogue between Rawls and the economists, both as regards the attitude of the economists towards Rawls and as regards Rawls's position towards economists and the economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Are fairness and efficiency compatible in behavioral welfare economics? Assuming multi-self agents, who may not be able to integrate their various objectives into complete and transitive rankings, we call an allocation unambiguously-fair if it fair according to every self of every agent. We show that efficiency is generically compatible with the unambiguous fair-share guarantee, and — in two agent economies — with unambiguous no-envy. But in some larger economies, no efficient allocation satisfies unambiguous no-envy or unambiguous egalitarian equivalence. These non-existence results persist if the agents integrate their objectives into complete but intransitive rankings. Even if unambiguously envy-free Pareto optima exist, they may not arise as market equilibria from equal endowments. Finally, we show that there are Pareto optima with the unambiguous fair-share guarantee that are envy-free for at least one complete and transitive aggregation of the agents' preferences, and others that are egalitarian-equivalent according to at least one such aggregation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study explores the human resource transformation from the food-delivery workers' perspective. Utilizing a mixed-methods approach, we found nine job motivations fitted to a tri-dimensional conceptualization model of the food-delivery workers. Four role senders who induce stresses in the role structures were identified. The effects of job motivations on role stressors vary across different working conditions. Role conflict is a severe problem generating turnover intention in the supply-side of sharing economy. The practical contribution shows productivity enhancement from workers' intrinsic factors. The extrinsic factors of welfare economics are still essential for human resource transformation in the sharing economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Neonatal calf diarrhea syndrome, also known as calf scours or enteritis, is a common condition that affects young calves, particularly those between one and three weeks of age. This syndrome has a multifactorial etiology and has a negative impact on farm economics and welfare. The severity of diarrhea can range from mild to severe, and it can lead to dehydration, electrolyte imbalances, and even death in severe cases. Early recognition and prompt treatment of diarrhea are essential to minimize the negative impact on calf health and productivity. This study was conducted on a private farm at the request of the owner on a 3-week-old female in October 2022. The clinical examination was requested due to changes in the general condition such as apathy, uncontrollable diarrhea, dehydration, colic syndrome, inappetence, high body temperature. This abstract provides an overview of the causes and management of diarrhea in neonates, including prevention strategies and treatment options. Understanding the appearance of diarrhea in the neonatal period is crucial for healthcare providers and caregivers to ensure the optimal health and well-being of newborns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BACKGROUND: At a time when welfare contracts are in crisis, it is timely to discuss different forms of disruptive innovation and responses of medical finance and economic systems, especially adjusting with new instruments for recovery and innovative solutions for health reforms. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper is to propose some ways to develop a framework for policy changes affecting life science sectors and healthcare. It aims to analyze the types of relationships between health or medical systems and the economic systems. METHOD: Medical systems used to be generally closed systems, but the new forms of delivery, especially with increase of telehealth and Mobile health (Mhealth) solutions (boosted by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as online consultations), have open traditional boundaries and generate more interactions with economic systems. It also led to new institutional arrangements at federal, national, or local levels, with different power games according to the history of institutions and cultural differences between countries. RESULTS: Which system dynamics prevail will also depend on the political systems in place, for instance very innovative open innovation systems dominated by private players such as the USA empower individuals and favor intuitive and entrepreneurial states. On the other hand, systems historically dominated by socialized insurance or former communist countries, have investigated "attunements" or adaptation mechanisms in system intelligence. However, systemic changes are not only implemented by traditional rulers (government agencies, federal reserve banks) but also face the emergence of systemic platforms dominated by Big Tech players. The new agendas expressed for instance in the United Nation (UN) framework and the set of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for climate change and sustainable growth, also require global adjustment of supply and demand, in a context where the traditional drug/vaccine split is challenged by the new technologies (e.g., mRNA technologies). Investment for drug research led to the development of COVID-19 vaccines, but also potential cancer vaccines. Finally, welfare economics is increasingly criticized among economist circles; it requires new design for global value assessment framework, facing growing inequalities and inter-generational challenges in aging populations. CONCLUSION: This paper contributes to new models of developments and different frameworks for multiple stakeholders with major technological changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Utilitarianism is the most prominent social welfare function in economics. We present three new axiomatic characterizations of utilitarian (that is, additively-separable) social welfare functions in a setting where there is risk over both population size and individuals' welfares. We first show that, given uncontroversial basic axioms, Blackorby et al.'s (J Popul Econ 11:1–20, 1998) Expected Critical-Level Generalized Utilitarianism is equivalent to a new axiom holding that it is better to allocate higher utility-conditional-on-existence to possible people who have a higher probability of existence. The other two characterizations extend and clarify classic axiomatizations of utilitarianism from settings with either social risk or variable-population, considered alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Frank Knight was an enigmatic thinker: about economics, individual behavior more generally, ethics, epistemology, and a number of other subjects. However, his views on some topics often created tensions with his views on other topics. This paper will examine two of these Knightian tensions: his views on the relationship between homo economicus the actual human behavior and his views on the relationship between rational economic behavior and normative economics. It will be argued that Knight anticipated many of the anomalies identified by behavioral economics and yet did so while defending homo economicus to some degree. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Two spatial equilibria, agglomeration, and dispersion, in a continuous space core–periphery model, are examined to discuss which equilibrium is socially preferred. It is shown that when transport cost is lower than a critical value, the agglomeration equilibrium is preferable in the sense of the Scitovszky criterion, while when the transport cost is above the critical value, the two equilibria cannot be ordered in the sense of the Scitovszky criterion. • Welfare economic properties of a NEG model in a continuous space are investigated. • Agglomeration is preferable when transport cost is low. • Agglomeration and dispersion cannot be ordered when the transport cost is high. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document titled "Subject Categories" provides a comprehensive list of topics related to planning that are covered in the Journal of Planning Literature. These topics include history, concepts of planning, policy and planning administration, planning law and legislation, planning and society, development planning, international planning, methodology/quantitative/economic/qualitative, population, economics, physical/environmental, transportation and communication, architecture and urban design, and environmental psychology/environment, behavior, and society. Each category is further divided into subcategories, offering a wide range of subjects for library patrons conducting research on specific planning topics. [Extracted from the article]

Simple Summary: Lameness in cows is a major problem within the dairy industry that concerns both economics and animal welfare. The assigning of locomotion quality "scores" by human observers watching cows walk is a commonly used method for identifying lameness in dairy cows. However, automated gait assessment technologies have been developed as an alternative, and these can provide more detailed and objective data regarding locomotion. The three primary types of technology used for this purpose are kinetic, kinematic, and accelerometric, which involve looking at movement regarding space and time, forces associated with motion, and acceleration, respectively. We conducted a systematic literature review to determine measurements, and relationships between them, that have been recorded using these technologies, as well as through other methods. Within the 37 articles that were included, measurements recorded using these different technologies often overlapped. However, inconsistencies regarding details of the technologies and the approaches used made it difficult to compare specific locomotion measurements across studies. More research is needed to achieve a comprehensive understanding of how factors regarding the health, environment, and management of dairy cows affect locomotion, as recorded through the detailed, objective outcome measurements provided by these technologies. Lameness within the dairy industry is a concern because of its associated costs and welfare implications. Visual locomotion scoring has been commonly used for assessing cows' locomotion quality, but it can have low reliability and is relatively subjective compared to automated methods of assessing locomotion. Kinematic, kinetic, and accelerometric technologies can provide a greater number of more detailed outcome measurements than visual scoring. The objective of this systematic review was to determine outcome measurements, and the relationships between them, that have been recorded using kinematic, kinetic, and accelerometric technologies, as well as other approaches to evaluating cow locomotion. Following PRISMA guidelines, two databases were searched for studies published from January 2000 to June 2022. Thirty-seven articles were retained after undergoing a screening process involving a title and abstract evaluation, followed by a full-text assessment. Locomotion measurements recorded using these technologies often overlapped, but inconsistencies in the types of technology, the arrangement of equipment, the terminology, and the measurement-recording approaches made it difficult to compare locomotion measurements across studies. Additional research would contribute to a better understanding of how factors regarding the health, environment, and management of dairy cows affect aspects of locomotion, as recorded through the detailed, objective outcome measurements provided by these technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the 2010s, a major focus of public policy and public policy debates was about understanding the sources of inequality and understanding the role of government in addressing income inequality. While progress has been made, significant gaps in inequality remain—gaps that go well beyond income inequality and that were emphasized throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. The experiences of the pandemic have served as a reminder that individuals in society have distinct experiences, and that attention to inequality and diversity needs to be seriously incorporated into modernized policy frameworks. As governments commit to a fair recovery from COVID-19 amid a broad desire for a more just society, a more inclusive approach to policy analysis is required to address longstanding failures in the economy and society. Modernized policy frameworks need to be more representative of and attentive to the experiences and struggles of marginalized and underrepresented populations. Intersectionality is an analytical tool rooted in the social justice paradigm that makes clear the links between notions of identity and the systems of power through which they play out. Intersectionality considers the ways in which our identities are formed at the intersections of various social constructs, such as race, ability, class, and gender, and within broader contexts and structures of power, such as the labour market and government institutions. Fully integrating intersectionality into policy analysis could create a policy analysis structure that would advance policy agendas of diversity, inclusion, and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article addresses the problem that societies face for properly allocating resources to grant security to their members. It examines the methods and ways for setting and distributing these resources to obtain enough military capabilities to face threats. The problem: the choice of an allocation that optimizes social welfare is an old and constant concern for public policies. The main novelty of this article is to explore this problem from the bounded rationality of human beings, i.e. choices made under imperfect information, preferences unsupported by economic rationality or the constrained effectiveness of non-market arrangements for deciding adequately. These issues may drive to allocations that do not obtain the largest welfare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article problematizes state penality as a mechanism of repression of precarious workers through a war on drugs in the Philippines. The narratives of 27 arrested 'drug personalities' in Metro Manila tell of how methamphetamine energizes bodies and motivates minds for productive work. Bidding to be classified as willing and able workers and family men, the study's participants orient to a moral stratification that pits the 'moral versus immoral' and the 'hardworking versus lazy'. Qualifying their drug use as strategic and calculated, they uphold the neoliberal values of individual choice and accountability. Their support for the anti-drug campaign stems from their recognition of a drug problem and the socioemotional toll of the dysfunctions of living in the slums. While trade liberalization facilitates methamphetamine inflow, a war on drugs fuels an authoritarian populism. As the state reaffirms symbolic mission to protect its citizens, it blames precarity to a problem population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on public opinion about economic redistribution has made important progress by incorporating the psychological microfoundation that shapes support for redistribution to the poor. However, one piece is missing: the microfoundation shaping support for redistribution from the rich. I provide a novel theory about this facet of redistributive attitudes and how it is distinct. Observational data from three nationally representative samples in two different welfare systems and an experiment show that attitudes about taking from the rich are mainly driven by perceptions of their prosociality—whether they are greedy or generous. This contrasts with public opinion about giving to the poor that is mainly driven by perceptions of the efforts of poor people. Furthermore, while compassion shapes attitudes about giving to the poor, the emotions of admiration and envy shape attitudes about taking from the rich. These findings have important theoretical and empirical implications for public opinion about economic redistribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study worst-case fairness in resource allocation and cooperative games with transferable utility, the stable division most dissimilar to a normative standard of fairness. Motivated by welfare economics, similarity is quantified using information-theoretic divergences. Worst-case fairness aims to parallel the spirit of the price of anarchy from noncooperative game theory, quantifying how much unfairness is compatible with coalitional rationality. Computing worst-case fairness is tractable in weighted voting games and classes of coalitional skill games, but NP-hard in highway allocation, induced-subgraph games and some task-count coalitional skill games. In these cases we show approximation algorithms that yield constant approximations. We also upper bound the performance of a Reverse Greedy algorithm on general convex games in terms of two game-specific constants. • We study worst-case fairness in resource allocation and cooperative games with transferable utility. • We consider the imputation in the core with the largest divergence with a fixed imputation, a "standard of fairness". • We study the problem for several classes of cooperative games with transferable utility. • In cases when worst-case fairness is intractable we give algorithms that produce an approximately worst-case fair imputation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article investigates local communities’ attitudes towards cooperation to promote community-based tourism and local heritage preservation in Kandovan, northwest of Iran. Drawing on data gathered by means of qualitative interviews, questionnaires, and participant observation, the article evaluates locals’ willingness to cooperate among themselves as well as with external stakeholders. The findings reveal a positive inclination to collaborate among locals and diverse intentions in cooperating with other stakeholders. The article advocates for a collaborative, inclusive approach that fosters mutual understanding in community-based tourism and heritage preservation to accomplish developmental objectives and promote local welfare. It adopts a novel approach in that, rather than examining the results of an ongoing or completed community-based tourism project, it focuses on issues relating to such tourism where it has not yet been established. on nowatorskie podejście, ponieważ zamiast analizować wyniki trwającego lub przestarzałego projektu turystyki opartej na społeczności, skupia się na kwestiach związanych z taką turystyką, która jeszcze nie została wprowadzona. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I comment on Sunstein's paper proposing 'Hayekian behavioural economics'. In essence, Sunstein is merely renaming a familiar approach to normative economics, initiated in Sunstein and Thaler's seminal 2003 paper. I argue that this approach cannot fairly be described as in the spirit of Hayek's work. Sunstein's approach is based on a 'constructivist' conception of rationality that Hayek consistently criticized. Although both Hayek and Sunstein address 'knowledge problems', the two problems are fundamentally different. I develop what I claim are truly Hayekian critiques of Sunstein's claim that fuel economy mandates can be more Hayekian than carbon taxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I re-visit the two arguments in my original paper, published in this journal in 1989. Pleasingly (but perhaps suspiciously) I have no reason to challenge them, but the insights that have come from behavioural economics over the intervening 35 years provide important new sources of support for both. The insights with respect to endogenous preferences add weight to the first argument for why collective/social choice is important (i.e., why welfare economics matters). In the second argument over the specific egalitarian flavour of post-Keynesian welfare proposals, I now fine tune this suggestion with the aid of behavioural insights so as to focus on the egalitarian character of the rules (and not the outcomes in society). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I defend a version of the medical model of disability, which defines disability as an enduring biological dysfunction that causes its bearer a significant degree of impairment. We should accept the medical model, I argue, because it succeeds in capturing our judgments about what conditions do and do not qualify as disabilities, because it offers a compelling explanation for what makes a condition count as a disability, and because it justifies why the federal government should spend hundreds of billions of dollars, annually, on aid and accommodations for disabled people. After responding to a pair of objections Elizabeth Barnes has raised against the medical model, I contrast it with Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu's welfarist account of disability, and with Barnes's own mere-difference view. Both of these accounts face serious challenges, although elements of Barnes's view can—and, in my opinion, should—be adopted by proponents of the medical model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines whether a Northern firm prefers to export or to engage in FDI to serve the South. If the firm engages in FDI, its technology is imitated, and a Southern firm enters the market that may sell in both markets. The Northern firm may invest to prevent product piracy in the North. The two markets may have different sizes. We find that when the cost of preventing product piracy in the North is great enough: (i) If the Southern market is large enough the Northern firm engages in FDI, allowing piracy in its home market, and the South obtains the greater welfare; (ii) If the Southern market is small enough the Northern firm exports and the government of the South imposes a strong Intellectual Property Rights protection, attracting the Northern firm and improving the welfare of both countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay uses concepts from Adam Smith's The Theory of Moral Sentiments to develop ideas about choice and welfare. I use those ideas to offer several challenges to common approaches to behavioral welfare economics and new paternalist policy making. Drawing on Smith's dialectical concept of practical reason, which he develops in expositing ideas about self-awareness and self-judgment, I first argue that inconsistency need not be viewed as pathological. Inconsistent choices might indicate legitimate context-dependencies as individuals reflect over disjointed perspectives and act accordingly. Understanding inconsistency as reasonable raises epistemic difficulties for identifying errant choices and designing corrective policies. Second, I draw on Smith's theory of the impartial spectator to discuss dynamic aspects of welfare. Welfare is not simply a matter of preference satisfaction but involves a sense of progress and improvement towards better preferences. Smith's account suggests that economists interested in welfare should focus on institutional arrangements that facilitate self-development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The document titled "Subject Categories" provides a comprehensive list of topics related to planning, divided into different categories. These categories include History/Theory/Administration, Policy and Planning Administration, Planning Law and Legislation, Planning and Society, Development Planning, International Planning, Methodology/Quantitative/Economic/Qualitative, Population, Economics, Physical/Environmental, Transportation and Communication, Architecture and Urban Design, and Environmental Psychology/Environment, Behavior, and Society. Each category is further divided into subtopics, providing library patrons with a wide range of subjects to explore for their research. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the status of antitrust law in the U.S. Topics mentioned include a description of the consumer welfare standard, the market power of the defendant corporation, the analysis of big technological companies Google, Amazon, and Facebook that engaged in anticompetitive behavior and violated antitrust laws, and the consequences of monopolies.

The socio-economic policies of the British 'New Right' administrations have been associated with increases in crime using aggregate data. This paper assesses if the trend remains when we test individual-level relationships using two British cohort studies (the National Child Development Study 1958 and the British Cohort Study 1970). Our results point to a set of long-term 'period effects' in which those reliant on the welfare state at specific time-points in the 1980 and 1990s (regardless of their age) were more likely to be drawn into the criminal justice system in adulthood (circa 2000). This paper considers (i) how British 'New Right' welfare policies may have had unintended, but lasting consequences for individuals in receipt of social security assistance and (ii) the interplay between micro and macro criminological analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the book The tragic science: how economists cause harm (even as they aspire to do good) by M. George F. DeMartino. The Author criticizes the moral geometry used by economists to evaluate harm, arguing for a more multifaceted understanding of harm that considers epistemic uncertainty. While the book under review lacks a systematic study of the moral dimension of harm, the Author's versatility and scholarship are admirable, making it an inspiring read for both casual readers and professionals in economics and philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By identifying well-being with preference satisfaction, mainstream normative economists were able to leave the determination of which specific things make people better or worse off to the individuals themselves. The findings of behavioral economics undermine the possibility of deferring in this way to individual preference. One response to this challenge to welfare economics is to distinguish the true preferences of individuals from their manifest preferences and to take true preferences to guide policy. In The Community of Advantage, Robert Sugden criticizes this strategy and proposes that economists appraise policies, institutions and outcomes by the opportunities they provide rather than by their contributions to welfare. This paper criticizes Sugden's view and argues for a modest solution that makes cautious use of preferences as indicators of well-being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper asserts that political leaders around the world and the emergence of digital information technologies have contributed remarkably to the amplifications and normalizations of telling big lies, thus the noticeable increase in the global consumption of big lies at varying degrees. To underscore this assertion, this paper uses the theoretical framework of utility maximization to show that human beings, in a world in which "we are all liars," consume truths and big lies subject to their information constraints. Furthermore, we use the concept of welfare economics to underscore the assertion that truths generate positive externalities, which can lead to outcomes that are social welfare-enhancing while big lies generate negative externalities, which can result in outcomes that are social welfare-retarding. The United States provides an illustrative example of a country where the consumption of big lies may be outpacing the consumption of truths because big lies have become the political philosophy of one of the political parties whose objective is to use big lies as the weapons of democracy destruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 2008/09 economic crisis was – unsurprisingly – paralleled by noteworthy perceptions of socio-economic insecurity among Europeans. Respondents in different countries reported more or less grave fears of employment and income insecurity depending on their respective countries' performance during the crisis. Against this background, we are interested in the manifestations of perceived socio-economic insecurity and their macro contextual determinants. After formulating hypotheses regarding socio-economic and welfare-institutional factors, we test them by using two rounds of the European Social Survey (fielded in 2008/09 and 2016/17). Based on three-level regressions with between-within models of 23,000 individuals (11,611 individuals in 2008/09 and 11,389 individuals in 2016/17) nested in 34 country-years and 17 European countries, we find that the level of perceived socio-economic insecurity in 2016/17 was generally lower than in 2008/09. Additionally, we reveal differences in the effects of the socio-economic factors and welfare-institutional factors between and within countries. These findings suggest that the inconsistency of the results of contextual factors among previous studies might stem from jumbling between- and within-country effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the status of antitrust law in the U.S. Topics mentioned include a description of the consumer welfare standard, the market power of the defendant corporation, the analysis of big technological companies Google, Amazon, and Facebook that engaged in anticompetitive behavior and violated antitrust laws, and the consequences of monopolies.

This article examines the ways that Danish gang exit programs engage police officers and gang defectors in a pervasive work on belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. In urban Denmark, the majority of gang exit candidates are of ethnic-minority background and form part of the street-gang environment in marginalized migrant neighborhoods. This is an intimate social environment constituted by diasporic kinship networks, where gang formations are entangled with kinship formations. Hence, when gang defectors leave their gang, they also often leave their family and childhood home for a life in unfamiliar places and positions. As I show, gang desistance is thus a highly dilemmatic process in which gang defectors find themselves "unhinged" from meaningful social and kinship relationships and in search of new ways of embedding themselves into a social world. Based on an ethnographic study of gang exit processes in Denmark's second largest city, Aarhus, this article shows how police officers and gang defectors seek to (re)shape ties of belonging between gangs, kinship networks and the state. The process, I argue, illuminates the intimate aspect of the notion of belonging, in which kin and state relatedness is deeply rooted in interpersonal spaces and relationships. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research background: In the distributive analysis, the constant relative inequality aversion utility function is a standard tool for ethical judgements of income distributions. The sole parameter e of this function expresses a society's aversion to inequality. However, the profession has not committed to the range of e. When assessing inequality and other welfare characteristics, analysts assume an arbitrary level of e, common to all countries and years. This assumption seems unjustified. Purpose of the article: This paper aims to estimate the parameter e for each country and year individually using datasets from the Luxembourg Income Study Database in all available years, which dates back to the 1970s. Methods: We utilise the method of estimating e, which assumes the generalised beta of the second kind distribution of incomes. The estimator of e is derived from the mathematical condition of the existence of the social welfare function. Findings & value added: We have elaborated an 'atlas' of 388 estimates of e for 55 countries across time. Inequality aversion is country-year specific, with a minimum of 0.97 and a maximum of 3.8. Ninety per cent of all estimates are less than 2.5. Inequality aversion is negatively correlated with income inequality, but it is independent of economic development. Thus, inequality aversion appears as an additional dimension of the classical inequality-development relationship. This article contributes to solving a fundamental problem of Welfare Economics: directly measuring the social utility of income (welfare) function. The estimates of e for 55 countries imply a complete knowledge of these countries' constant relative inequality aversion utility functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Behavioral welfare economics (BWE) assigns different roles to preferences than either non-behavioral forms of welfare economics or theories outside of the domain of welfare economics. In particular, BWE differs from other forms of welfare economics in its attempt to distinguish welfare-relevant from welfare-irrelevant subjective attitudes based on some notion of deliberation error. Based on recent arguments for the purpose-dependence of the interpretation of preferences, I argue that a functionalist-dispositional understanding of preference is not sufficient for BWE. Instead, I distinguish two levels of functional analysis – algebraic and algorithmic – and argued that it is the algorithmic level, capturing the relevant mental processes and representations producing the observed behavior, that is required for BWE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]