We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members' ordinal preferences - that is, how they interpret "the will of the people." In an experiment, we elicit revealed attitudes toward ordinal preference aggregation and classify subjects according to the rules they apparently...

A long-standing challenge for welfare economics is to develop welfare criteria that can be applied to allocations with different population levels. Such a criterion is essential to resolve the optimal population problem, i.e., the tradeoff between population size and the welfare of each person...

This paper studies the design of the optimal linear taxation of bequests when individuals differ in wage as well as in their risks of both mortality and old-age dependence. We assume that the government cannot distinguish between bequests motives, that is whether bequests resulted from...