When evaluating long-term policies, economists usually suggest to maximize the sum of discounted utilities. On the one hand, discounted utilitarianism was given a solid axiomatic foundation by Koopmans (Econometrica 1960). On the other hand, this criterion has questionable implications when...

Evaluation of climate policies and other issues requires a variable population setting where population is endogenously determined. We propose and axiomatize the rank-discounted critical-level utilitarian social welfare order. It is shown to ll out the space between critical-level utilitarianism...

The Dasgupta-Heal-Solow-Stiglitz model of capital accumulation and resource depletion poses the following sustainability problem: is it feasible to sustain indefinitely a level of consumption that is bounded away from zero? We provide a complete technological characterization of the...

A framework is developed for analyzing national income accounting using a revealed welfare approach that is sufficiently general to cover, both the standard discounted utilitarian and maximin criteria as special cases. We show that the basic welfare properties of comprehensive national income...

We analyze infinite-horizon choice functions within the setting of a simple linear technology. Time consistency and efficiency are characterized by stationary consumption and inheritance functions, as well as a transversality condition. In addition, we consider the equity axioms Suppes-Sen,...

We consider the problem of bargaining over the disclosure of interim research knowledge between two participants in an R&D race for an ultimate, patentable invention. Licence fee schedules that are functions of the "amount of knowledge disclosed", by the leading to the lagging agent, are...