This paper reports an experimental study on three well-known solutions for problems of adjudicating con icting claims: the constrained equal-awards, the proportional, and the constrained equal-losses rules. We first let subjects play three games designed such that the unique equilibrium...

This paper examines how to satisfy a separability condition related to “independence of the utilities of the dead” (Blackorby et al., 1995; Bommier and Zuber, 2008) in the class of “expected equally distributed equivalent” social orderings (Fleurbaey, 2010). It also inquires into the...

Harsanyi (1955) proved that, in the context of uncertainty, social ratio- nality and the Pareto principle impose severe constraints on the degree of priority for the worst-off that can be adopted in the social evaluation. Since then, the literature has hesitated between an ex ante approach that...

We argue that the economic evaluation of health care (cost-benefit analysis) should respect individual preferences and should incorporate distributional consid- erations. Relying on individual preferences does not imply subjective welfarism. We propose a particular non- welfarist approach, based...

For two independent principles of intergenerational equity, the implied discount rate equals the growth rate of real per-capita income, say 2%, thus falling right into the range suggested by the U.S. Offce of Management and Budget. To prove this, we develop a simple tool to evaluate small policy...

In a framework of preferences over lotteries, we show that an axiom system consisting of weakened versions of Arrow's axioms has a unique solution. "Relative Utilitarianism" consists of first normalising individual von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities between 0 and 1 and then summing them. This...

Current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) guidelines use the interest rate as a basis for the discount rate, and have nothing to say about an intergenerationally fair discount rate. We derive this discount rate by differentiating a social welfare function with respect to perturbations in...

We revisit and extend previous theoretical work on internationalization decisions by firms which are imperfectly informed on the state of the demand in the market into which they are planning to export or enter through foreign direct investment (FDI). The latter is a costly strategy mitigating...