The present paper aims to explore the perception of fairness in conflicting claims problems (O'Neill in Math Soc Sci 2(4):345-371, 1982). To do so, we present a questionnaire given to a large heterogeneous group of people (students, employees, retirees). Distributive justice criteria are studied...

Minimum-cost spanning tree problems are well-known problems in the operations research literature. Some agents, located at different geographical places, want a service provided by a common supplier. Agents will be served through costly connections. Some part of the literature has focused,...

Aphorisms that "Rising tides raise all boats" or that material advances of the rich eventually "Trickle Down" to the poor are really maxims regarding the nature of stochastic processes that underlay the income/wellbeing paths of groups of individuals. This paper looks at the implications for the...

The key role of technological change in the decline of energy and carbon intensities of aggregate economic activities is widely recognized. This has focused attention on the issue of developing endogenous models for the evolution of technological change. With a few exceptions this is done using...

A collective decision problem is described by a set of agents, a profile of single-peaked preferences over the real line and a number k of public facilities to be located. We consider public facilities that do not suffer from congestion and are non-excludable. We provide a characterization of...

The prevailing literature discusses intergenerational trade-offs predominantly in infinitely-lived agent models despite the finite lifetime of individuals. We discuss these trade-offs in a continuous time OLG framework and relate the results to the infinitely-lived agent setting. We identify...

The belief that both the behavior and outcomes of students are affected by their peers is important in shaping education policy. I analyze two polar education systems -tracking and mixing- and propose several criteria for their comparison. I find that tracking is the system that maximizes...