I review the complex welfare economic issues that arise in environmental decision-making over very long periods, as in cases relating to climate change and biodiversity loss. I also consider the issues that arise in choosing a discount rate to apply to very long-run projects and indicate how...

In this paper we develop theoretical criteria and econometric methods to rank policy interventions in terms of welfare when individuals are loss-averse. The new criterion for "loss aversion-sensitive dominance" defines a weak partial ordering of the distributions of policy-induced gains and...

Some claim that `incommensurability` poses serious problems for the standard account of rationality and for the case for markets in economics. Incommensurability may indeed involve violations of basic axioms, such as completeness, transitivity and continuity. Sen`s version of the maximization...

Amartya Sen’s impossibility of a Paretian liberal underscores the trade-off between two widely applied social principles—liberalism and Pareto-optimality: “If someone does have certain liberal values, then he [or she] may have to eschew his [or her] adherence to Pareto optimality” (Sen...

The use of equivalence scales for the measurement of inequality and social welfare poses a difficult ethical and technical dilemma. If all individuals are weighted equally while individual welfare measures are based on income or consumption per equivalent adult, then standard properties assumed...

Exit, Voice, and Loyalty (A.O. Hirschman 1970) is a theoretical concept derived from the work of Albert O. Hirschman (1970) which is focused on two essential options in organizatios and products decline, being exit and voice.The basis concept is as follows: members of an organization, whether...

We discuss the general problem of finding fair constrained resource allocations. As criterion for fairness we propose an inequality index, termed fairness ratio, the maximization of which produces Lorenz-undominated Pareto-efficient allocations. Since the fairness ratio does not depend on the...

This chapter examines the role of altruistic motives in the economic analysis of public social transfers, both from a positive and from a normative point of view. The positive question is to know whether we can fully neglect altruistic considerations to explain the development or sustainability...

This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

When individuals' utility is a convex combination of their income and their concern at having a low relative income (the weights attached to income and to the concern at having a low relative income sum up to one), the maximization of aggregate utility yields an equal income distribution. This...