Online advertising offers unprecedented opportunities for measurement. A host of new metrics, clicks being the leading example, have become widespread in advertising science. New data and experimentation platforms open the door for firms and researchers to measure true causal effects of...

We consider an environment in which there is substantial uncertainty about the potential negative external effects of AI algorithms. We find that subjecting algorithm implementation to regulatory approval or mandating testing is insufficient to implement the social optimum. When testing costs...

This paper develops a welfare accounting decomposition that identifies and quantifies the ultimate origins of welfare gains and losses in general economies with heterogeneous individuals and disaggregated production. The decomposition---exclusively based on preferences and technologies---first...

Researchers cannot definitively interpret what the framers of the United States Constitution had in mind when they wrote of the general Welfare. Nevertheless, welfare economics can contribute to policy choice in democracies. Specifying social welfare functions enables coherent analysis, by...

When studying policy-relevant topics, researchers' policy preferences may shape the design, execution, analysis, and interpretation of results. Detection of such bias is challenging because the research process itself is not normally part of a controlled experimental setting. Our analysis...

"We prove that the change in welfare of a representative consumer is summarized by the current and expected future values of the standard Solow productivity residual. The equivalence holds if the representative household maximizes utility while taking prices parametrically. This result justifies...

This paper has two goals. First, we discuss several emerging approaches to applied welfare analysis under non-standard ("behavioral") assumptions concerning consumer choice. This provides a foundation for Behavioral Public Economics. Second, we illustrate applications of these approaches by...

This paper contains the chapters on welfare economics, morality, and the law from a general, forthcoming book, Foundations of Economic Analysis of Law (Harvard University Press, 2003). I begin in chapter 26 with a discussion of the normative foundations of economic analysis, namely, the subject...

In many settings, decision-makers' behavior is observed to vary based on seemingly arbitrary factors. Such framing effects cast doubt on the welfare conclusions drawn from revealed preference analysis. We relax the assumptions underlying that approach to accommodate settings in which framing...