In an influential paper, Kaplow and Shavell (Journal of Political Economy, 2001) propose and prove a proposition that “Any non-welfarist method of policy assessment violates the Pareto principle.” In this paper, I first make a counter example to prove that their proposition is false. I also...

This paper reexamines the design of the optimal lockdown strategy by paying attention to its robustness to the postulated social welfare criterion. We first characterize optimal lockdown under utilitarianism, and we show that this social criterion can, under some conditions, imply a COVID-19...

The public at large, many policymakers, and a number of economists hold views of social welfare that are non-welfarist, which is to say that some importance is attached to factors other than individuals' utilities. We show, however, that any non-welfarist method of policy assessment violates the...