In spatial environments we consider social welfare functions satisfying Arrow’s requirements, i.e. weak Pareto and independence of irrelevant alternatives. Individual preferences measure distances between alternatives according to the Lp-norm (for a fixed p = 1). When the policy space is...

Ranking development programs using integrals of discounted utilities can yield drastic consequences that offend our sense of justice. New alternative social welfare criteria should be considered. A reaction to discounted utilitarianism is to moderate its effects by adding to the social welfare...

In this paper we show that lobbying in conditions of “direct democracy” is virtually impossible, even in conditions of complete information about voters preferences, since it would require solving a very computationally hard problem. We use the apparatus of parametrized complexity for this...

I introduce the HESSIAN method for semi-Gaussian state space models with univariate states. The vector of states a=(a^1, ... , a^n) is Gaussian and the observed vector y= (y^1 , ... , y^n ) need not be. I describe a close approximation g(a) to the density f(a|y). It is easy and fast to evaluate...

This paper considers an environment where individual actions have externalities, and where there are two types of agents: socially responsible agents (the good) and selfish agents. Selfish agents have payoff functions that do not take into account social welfare. The payoff of a socially...

We examine the measurement of individual poverty in an intertemporal context. In contrast to earlier contributions, we assign importance to the persistence in a state of poverty and we characterize a class of individual intertemporal poverty measures reflecting this feature. In addition, we...