In a period of political change in the European Union, when the European Constitution is in the centre of the debate, the social convergence among European Union countries is a crucial issue. However, the measurement of welfare, inequality and poverty and the comparisons among countries are...

Rankings have become increasingly popular on various markets, e.g. the market for study programs. We analyze their welfare implications. Consumers have to choose between two goods of unknown quality with exogenous presence or absence of an unbiased informative ranking. The existence of the...

Rankings have become increasingly popular on various markets, e.g. the market for study programs. We analyze their welfare implications. Consumers have to choose between two goods of unknown quality with exogenous presence or absence of an unbiased informative ranking. The existence of the...

Many online retailers offer personalized recommendations that help consumers make their choices. While standard recommendation algorithms are designed to guide consumers to the most relevant items, retailers may have strong incentives to deviate from these standard algorithms and instead steer...

Ranking information is often provided to improve task performance, yet its welfare and spillover effects are rarely measured. We measure these effects in a controlled laboratory experiment, in which participants conduct a simple cognitive task and report their willingness-to-pay (WTP) to receive...

We propose an abstract method of systematically assigning a "rational"' ranking to non-rationalizable choice data. We define an individual welfare functional as a mapping from stochastic choice functions into weak orders. A stochastic choice function (or choice distribution) gives the empirical...