ON THE AGGREGATION OF MONEY MEASURES OF WELL-BEING IN APPLIED WELFARE ECONOMICS

This article investigates the properties, good and bad, of social evaluations based on four money measures of well-being or changes in well-being: compensating variations, money metrics, extended money metrics, and welfare ratios. Consistency of social rankings (transitivity, asymmetry of preference), the possibility of incorporating inequality aversions, independence of the choice of reference prices, and the ethics implicit in the evaluations are considered. In addition, these procedures are contrasted with utility aggregation using equivalence scales.Consumer/Household Economics,

Index-Number Tests and the Common-Scaling Social Cost-of-Living Index

For a change in prices, the common-scaling social cost-of-living index is the equal scaling of every individual's expenditure level needed to restore the level of social welfare to its pre-change value. This index does not, in general, satisfy two standard index-number tests. The reversal test requires the index value for the reverse change to be the reciprocal of the original index. And the circular test requires the product of index values for successive price changes to be equal to the index value for the whole change. We show that both tests are satisfied if and only if the Bergson-Samuelson indirect social-welfare function is homothetic in prices, a condition which does not require individual preferences to be homothetic. If individual preferences are homothetic, however, stronger conditions on the Bergson-Samuelson indirect must be satisfied. Given these results, we ask whether the restrictions are empirically reasonable and find, in the case that individual preferences are not homothetic, that the restrictions make little difference to estimates of the index.social cost of living, aggregation, welfare economics

A methodology for testing virtualisation security

There is a growing interest in virtualisation due to its central role in cloud computing, virtual desktop environments and Green IT. Data centres and cloud computing utilise this technology to run multiple operating systems on one physical server, thus reducing hardware costs. However, vulnerabilities in the hypervisor layer have an impact on any virtual machines running on top, making security an important part of virtualisation. In this paper, we evaluate the security of virtualisation, including detection and escaping the environment. We present a methodology to investigate if a virtual machine can be detected and further compromised, based upon previous research. Finally, this methodology is used to evaluate the security of virtual machines. The methods used to evaluate the security include analysis of known vulnerabilities and fuzzing to test the virtual device drivers on three different platforms: VirtualBox, Hyper-V and VMware ESXI. Our results demonstrate that the attack surface of virtualisation is more prone to vulnerabilities than the hypervisor. Comparing our results with previous studies, each platform withstood IOCTL and random fuzzing, demonstrating that the platforms are more robust and secure than previously found. By building on existing research, the results show that security in the hypervisor has been improved. However, using the proposed methodology in this paper it has been shown that an attacker can easily determine that the machine is a virtual machine, which could be used for further exploitation. Finally, our proposed methodology can be utilised to effectively test the security of a virtualised environment

Population Ethics and the Value of Life

Public policies often involve choices of alternatives in which the size and the composition of the population may vary. Examples are the allocation of resources to prenatal care and the design of aid packages to developing countries. In order to assess the corresponding feasible choices on normative grounds, criteria for social evaluation that are capable of performing variable-population comparisons are required. We review several important axioms for welfarist population principles and discuss the link between individual well-being and the desirability of adding a new person to a given society.population ethics, neutrality, critical levels

MULTI-PROFILE WELFARISM : A GENERALISATION

This paper characterizes welfarist social evaluation in a multi-profile setting where, in addition to multiple utility profiles, there may be more than one profile of nonwelfare information. We prove a new version of the welfarism theorem in this alternative framework, and we demonstrate that adding a plausible and weak anonymity property to the welfarism axioms generates welfarist social-evaluation orderings that are anonymous. Journal of Economic LiteratureWelfarism ; Multiple-Profile Social Choice

ANONYMOUS SINGLE-PROFILE WELFARISM

This note reexamines the single-profile approach to social-choice theory. If an alternative is interpreted as a social state of affairs or a history of the world, it can be argued that a multi-profile approach is inappropriate because the information profile is determined by the set of alternatives. However, single-profile approaches are criticized because of the limitations they impose on the possibility of formulating properties such as anonymity. We suggest an alternative definition of anonymity that applies in a single-profile setting and characterize anonymous single-profile welfarism under a richness assumption.Welfarism ; Single-Profile Social Choice ; Anonymity

Population Principles with Number-Dependent Critical Levels

This paper introduces and characterizes the number-sensitive critical-level generalized utilitarian family of population principles which is a generalization of the critical-level generalized-utilitarian family. Number-sensitive critical-level utilitarian principles rank alternatives by using a value function that is equal to total utility minus a sum of critical levels that may depend on population size but not on individual utilities, and number-sensitive critical-level generalized-utilitarian principles use transformed utilities and critical levels. Ethical properties of the principles are investigated and the new family is compared to number-dampened generalized utilitarianism whose value functions are equal to transformed representative utility (average utility in the utilitarian case) multiplied by a function of population size.

TFIIIC Localizes Budding Yeast ETC Sites to the Nuclear Periphery

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