57,465 research outputs found
Welfarism in economic domains
In economies with public goods, and agents with quasi-linear preferences, we give a characterization of the welfare egalitarian correspondence in terms of three axioms: Pareto optimality, symmetry, and solidarity. This last property requires that an increase in the willingness to pay for the public goods of some of the agents should not decrease the welfare of any of them.Publicad
Utilitarianism with and without expected utility
We give two social aggregation theorems under conditions of risk, one for constant population cases, the other an extension to variable populations. Intra and interpersonal welfare comparisons are encoded in a single ‘individual preorder’. The theorems give axioms that uniquely determine a social preorder in terms of this individual preorder. The social preorders described by these theorems have features that may be considered characteristic of Harsanyi-style utilitarianism, such as indifference to ex ante and ex post equality. However, the theorems are also consistent with the rejection of all of the expected utility axioms, completeness, continuity, and independence, at both the individual and social levels. In that sense, expected utility is inessential to Harsanyi-style utilitarianism. In fact, the variable population theorem imposes only a mild constraint on the individual preorder, while the constant population theorem imposes no constraint at all. We then derive further results under the assumption of our basic axioms. First, the individual preorder satisfies the main expected utility axiom of strong independence if and only if the social preorder has a vector-valued expected total utility representation, covering Harsanyi’s utilitarian theorem as a special case. Second, stronger utilitarian-friendly assumptions, like Pareto or strong separability, are essentially equivalent to strong independence. Third, if the individual preorder satisfies a ‘local expected utility’ condition popular in non-expected utility theory, then the social preorder has a ‘local expected total utility’ representation. Fourth, a wide range of non-expected utility theories nevertheless lead to social preorders of outcomes that have been seen as canonically egalitarian, such as rank-dependent social preorders. Although our aggregation theorems are stated under conditions of risk, they are valid in more general frameworks for representing uncertainty or ambiguity
Mean-Dispersion Preferences and Constant Absolute Uncertainty Aversion
We axiomatize, in an Anscombe-Aumann framework, the class of preferences that admit a representation of the form V(f) = mu - rho(d), where mu is the mean utility of the act f with respect to a given probability, d is the vector of state-by-state utility deviations from the mean, and rho(d) is a measure of (aversion to) dispersion that corresponds to an uncertainty premium. The key feature of these mean-dispersion preferences is that they exhibit constant absolute uncertainty aversion. This class includes many well-known models of preferences from the literature on ambiguity. We show what properties of the dispersion function rho(dot) correspond to known models, to probabilistic sophistication, and to some new notions of uncertainty aversion.Ambiguity aversion, Translation invariance, Dispersion, Uncertainty, Probabilistic sophistication
Models for Paired Comparison Data: A Review with Emphasis on Dependent Data
Thurstonian and Bradley-Terry models are the most commonly applied models in
the analysis of paired comparison data. Since their introduction, numerous
developments have been proposed in different areas. This paper provides an
updated overview of these extensions, including how to account for object- and
subject-specific covariates and how to deal with ordinal paired comparison
data. Special emphasis is given to models for dependent comparisons. Although
these models are more realistic, their use is complicated by numerical
difficulties. We therefore concentrate on implementation issues. In particular,
a pairwise likelihood approach is explored for models for dependent paired
comparison data, and a simulation study is carried out to compare the
performance of maximum pairwise likelihood with other limited information
estimation methods. The methodology is illustrated throughout using a real data
set about university paired comparisons performed by students.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/12-STS396 the Statistical
Science (http://www.imstat.org/sts/) by the Institute of Mathematical
Statistics (http://www.imstat.org
Borrowing-proofness of the Lindahl rule in Kolm triangle economies
In the context of a simple model of public good provision, we study the requirement on an allocation rule that it be immune to manipulation by augmenting one's endowment through borrowing from the outside world. We call it open-economy borrowing-proofness (Thomson, 2009). We ask whether the Lindahl rule satisfies the property. The answer is yes on both the domain of quasi-linear economies and on the domain of homothetic economies. However, on the classical domain (when preferences are only required to be continuous, monotone, and convex), the answer is negative. We compare the manipulability of the rule through borrowing and its manipulability through withholding. We also asks whether the rule is immune to manipulation by borrowing from a fellow trader, closed-economy borrowing-proofness. We obtain a parallel set of answers. The negative results hold no matter how small the amount borrowed is constrained to be.Public good; Lindahl rule; Kolm triangle; borrowing-proofness; withholding-proofness.
Existence of GE: Are the Cases of Non Existence a Cause of Serious Worry?
In this work, we attempt to characterize the main theoretical difficulties to prove the existence of competitive equilibrium in infinite dimensional models. We shall show cases in which it is not possible to prove the existence of equilibrium and some others in which, however the existence of equilibrium can be proved, the equilibrium prices seem not to have natural economic interpretation. Nevertheless in pure exchange economies, most of these difficulties may be avoided by mild restrictions on the model. In productive economies new specifics problem appear, for instance non convexity of the production sets or non boundedness of the feasible allocation sets. To prove the existence and the efficiency of the equilibrium in productive economies we need some strong hypothesis about the technological possibilities of each firm.
Smallness of a commodity and partial equilibrium analysis
Partial equilibrium analysis has a conceptual dilemma that its object should be negligibly small in order to be free from income effect but then the consumer does not care for it and the notion of willingness to pay for it does not make sense. In the setting of a continuum of commodities, we propose a limiting procedure which transforms the general many-commodity framework into a partial single-commodity framework. In the limit, willingness to pay for a commodity is established as a density notion and it is shown to be free from income effect. This pins down an exact relationship between general equilibrium analysis and partial equilibrium analysis
Coherent Price Systems and Uncertainty-Neutral Valuation
We consider fundamental questions of arbitrage pricing arising when the
uncertainty model is given by a set of possible mutually singular probability
measures. With a single probability model, essential equivalence between the
absence of arbitrage and the existence of an equivalent martingale measure is a
folk theorem, see Harrison and Kreps (1979). We establish a microeconomic
foundation of sublinear price systems and present an extension result. In this
context we introduce a prior dependent notion of marketed spaces and viable
price systems. We associate this extension with a canonically altered concept
of equivalent symmetric martingale measure sets, in a dynamic trading framework
under absence of prior depending arbitrage. We prove the existence of such sets
when volatility uncertainty is modeled by a stochastic differential equation,
driven by Peng's G-Brownian motions
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