Caspar Hare ["Rationality and the Distant Needy," Philosophy & Public Affairs 35 (2007): 161-78] has offered two distinct, but related, arguments whose purpose is to show that anyone in a position to help someone in great need at little personal cost who is minimally decent must violate one or...

This article provides an introduction to the use of social welfare functions for the comparative evaluation of social alternatives. Three main approaches are considered: Bergson–Samuelson social welfare functions, Arrovian social welfare functions, and Sen's social welfare functionals....

We develop a North-South model in which a firm that enjoys monopoly status in the North (by virtue of a patent or a trademark) has the incentive to price discriminate internationally because Northern consumers value its product more than Southern ones. While North's policy regarding the...

There are a number of single-profile impossibility theorems in social choice theory and welfare economics that demonstrate the incompatibility of dominance criteria with various nonconsequentialist principles given some rationality restrictions on the rankings being considered. This article is...

We develop a North-South model in which a firm that enjoys monopoly status in the North (by virtue of a patent or a trademark) has the incentive to price discriminate internationally because Northern consumers value its product more than Southern ones. While North's policy regarding the...

We show that, in the context of the market for a professional service, adverse selection problems can sufficiently exacerbate moral hazard considerations so that even though all agents are risk neutral, welfare can be reduced by allowing the agent to �buy the firm� from the principal....

We model the game between an informed seller (a lawyer) and an uninformed buyer (a potential client) over the choice of compensation for the lawyer to take a case to trial, when there is post-contracting investment by the lawyer (effort at trial) that involves moral hazard. Clients incur a...

In this paper we use a signaling model to analyze the effect of (endogenously-determined) third-party non-recourse loans to plaintiffs on settlement bargaining when a plaintiff has private information about the value of her suit. We show that an optimal loan (i.e., one that maximizes the joint...

In this paper we use a signaling model to analyze the effect of (endogenously-determined) third-party non-recourse loans to plaintiffs on settlement bargaining when a plaintiff has private information about the value of her suit. We show that an optimal loan (i.e., one that maximizes the joint...

A dynamic general equilibrium model of search and matching is constructed in which: (i) the stock of public knowledge grows through time and (ii) workers accumulate a fraction of this knowledge through education while young. Once their schooling is complete workers enter a primary labor market,...