This chapter reviews the theory of the voluntary public and private redistribution of wealth elaborated by economic analysis in the last forty years or so. The central object of the theory is altruistic gift-giving, construed as benevolent voluntary redistribution of income or wealth. The theory...

Climate change is an externality since those who emit greenhouse gases do not pay the long-term negative consequences of their emissions. In view of the resulting inefficiency, it has been claimed that climate policies can be evaluated by the Pareto principle. However, climate policies lead to...

A cake is a metaphor for a heterogeneous, divisible good, such as land. A perfect division of cake is efficient (also called Pareto-optimal), envy-free, and equitable. We give an example of a cake in which it is impossible to divide it among three players such that these three properties are...

We model problems of allocating disputed properties as generalized exchange economies. Therein, agents have preferences and claims over multiple goods, and the social endowment of each good may not be sufficient to satisfy all individual claims. We focus on market-based allocation rules that...

We model problems of allocating disputed properties as generalized exchange economies in which agents have preferences and claims over multiple goods, and the social endowment of each good may not be sufficient to satisfy all individual claims. In this context, we investigate procedural and...

A competitive market mechanism is a prominent example of a nonbinary social choice rule, typically defined for a special class of economic environments in which each social state is an economic allocation of private goods, and individuals’ preferences concern only their own personal...

Recent theoretical work in the economics of climate change has suggested that climate policy is highly sensitive to "fat-tailed" risks of catastrophic outcomes (Weitzman, 2009b). Such risks are suggested to be an inevitable consequence of scientific uncertainty about the effects of increased...