The purpose of this paper is to examine the possibility of a social choice rule to implement a social policy for ìsecuring basic well-being for all.î The paper introduces a new scheme of social choice, called a social relation function (SRF), which associates a reáexive and transitive binary...

This paper discusses what determines the preferences of individuals for redistribution. We review the theoretical literature and provide a framework to incorporate various effects previously studied separately in the literature. We then examine empirical evidence for the US, using the General...

The paper examines the problem of aggregating infinite utility streams with a social welfare function which respects the Anonymity and Weak Pareto Axioms. It provides a complete characterization of domains (of the one period utilities) on which such an aggregation is possible. A social welfare...

It is known that the incompleteness of asset markets causes inefficiency in almost every equilibrium. Yet unexplored is the ”size” of this inefficiency. The size of a Pareto improvement is the total willingness to pay for it, out of current consumption. Inefficiency is the maximum size of...

Child labor is often condemned as a form of exploitation. I explore how the notion of exploitation, as used in everyday language, can be made precise in economic models of child labor. Exploitation is defined relative to a specific social welfare function. I first show that under the standard...

We examine the socially optimal wealth distribution in a two-person two-good model with heterogeneous workers and asymmetric social interactions where only one (social) individual derives positive or negative utility from the leisure of the other (non-social) individual. We show that the...

This paper studies how social relationships between managers and employees affect relational incentive contracts. To this end we develop a simple dynamic principal-agent model where both players may have feelings of altruism or spite toward each other. The contract may contain two types of...