In a growing number of countries, the delivery of social welfare services is contracted out to private providers, and increasingly, using performance-based contracts. Critics of performance-based incentive contracts stress their potential unintended effects, including cream-skimming and other...

Previous research shows that firms may offer excessively high (and shrouded) add-on prices in competitive markets when some consumers are myopic. We analyze the effects of regulatory intervention via educating myopic consumers on equilibrium strategies of firms, consumer protection and welfare....

We develop a social network model of occupational segregation between different social groups, generated by the existence of positive inbreeding bias among individuals from the same group. If network referrals are important for job search, then expected homophily in the contact network structure...

There is a large empirical literature on policy measures targeted at children but surprisingly very little theoretical foundation to ground the debate on the optimality of the different instruments. In the present paper, we examine the merit of targeting children through two general policies,...

We investigate the effects of inequality in wealth on the incentives to contribute to a public good when agents are inequity averse and may differ in ability. We show that equality may lead to a reduction of public good provision below levels generated by purely selfish agents. But introducing...

Income mobility is often thought to equalize permanent incomes and thereby to improve social welfare. The welfare analysis of mobility often fails, however, to account for the cost of the variability of periodic incomes around permanent incomes. This paper assesses the net welfare benefit of...

This thesis identifies the conditions under which and quantifies how much society gains from integrating demand response directly into wholesale electricity markets and the level of participation that will bring about these improvements. Furthermore, it identifies the conditions under which the...

This paper is concerned with the international mobility of New Zealanders who migrate to Australia. One in ten New Zealand citizens lives in Australia and their settlement and subsequent mobility is important from demographic, socio-economic and policy perspectives in both countries. Using a...

In this paper, we study intertemporal social welfare evaluations when agents have heterogeneous time preferences that are interpersonally noncomparable. We first show that, even if all agents share the same time preferences, there is a conflict between the axioms of Pareto principle, time...

Research background: Applied welfare economics offers various social welfare functions (SWF) for appraising income distributions. Social planners commonly use two SWFs: SWFε implied by income inequality aversion (ε) and SWFv implied by rank inequality aversion (v). However, a voluntary...