Climate change is an externality since those who emit greenhouse gases do not pay the long-term negative consequences of their emissions. In view of the resulting inefficiency, it has been claimed that climate policies can be evaluated by the Pareto principle. However, climate policies lead to...

This paper studies the possibility of secure implementation (Saijo, T., T. Sjöström, and T. Yamato (2007) "Secure Implementation," Theoretical Economics 2, pp. 203-229) in divisible and non-excludable public good economies with quasi-linear utility functions. Although Saijo, Sjöström, and...

"Strategy-proofness" is one of the axioms that are most frequently used in the recent literature on social choice theory. It requires that by misrepresenting his preferences, no agent can manipulate the outcome of the social choice rule in his favor. The stronger requirement of "group...

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...

A competitive market mechanism is a prominent example of a nonbinary social choice rule, typically defined for a special class of economic environments in which each social state is an economic allocation of private goods, and individuals’ preferences concern only their own personal...

Recent theoretical work in the economics of climate change has suggested that climate policy is highly sensitive to "fat-tailed" risks of catastrophic outcomes (Weitzman, 2009b). Such risks are suggested to be an inevitable consequence of scientific uncertainty about the effects of increased...

When evaluating well-being distributions in an anonymous (and replication invariant) manner, one faces a dilemma between (i) assigning dictatorship to a single worst-off person, thus succumbing to a tyranny of non-aggregation and (ii) assigning dictatorship to (unboundedly) many better-off...