A free trade is always Pareto-improving. But some “free trades” are actually forced in the sense that they reflect the trader’s poverty rather than his or her preferences. We propose a rigorous concept of forced trade, and apply it to the ethical evaluation of Walrasian equilibria.

am grateful to Jagdish Bhagwati for numerous discussions that shaped my thinking on the subject matter of this paper and to two anonymous reviewers for excellent comments on an earlier version of the paper. What trade policy initiatives can the rich countries such as the United States take to assist the poor countries in improving their growth prospects and achieving faster alleviation of pover...

In most of the cost-utility literature, quality-adjusted life-year (QALY) gains are interpreted as a measure of social value. Given this interpretation, the validity of different multi-attribute health-state scaling instruments may be tested by comparing the values they provide on the 0-1 QALY scale with directly elicited preferences for person trade-offs between different treatments (equivalen...

their preferences on those product dimensions. Since a single commodity market is made up of many heterogeneous goods that are close to each other but different in grade, quality and delivery conditions, preference satisfaction plays an important role in improving trade matches. In cotton markets, for instance, a cotton merchant may want to specify his preferences like " I prefer early delivery...

We study pure exchange economies with symmetries on preferences up to taste intensity transformations. In a 2-person, 2-good endowment economy, we show that bilateral symmetry on each utility functional precludes a rectangle in the Edgeworth box as the location of Pareto optimal allocations. Under strictly quasi-concave preferences, a larger set can be ruled out. The inadmissible region is stil...

OBJECTIVE Limited evidence for the optimal venous thromboembolism (VTE) prophylaxis regimen in orthopaedic trauma leads to variability in regimens. We sought to delineate patient preferences towards cost, complication profile, and administration route (oral tablet vs. subcutaneous injection). DESIGN Discrete choice experiment (DCE). SETTING Level 1 trauma center in Baltimore, USA. PARTICI...

Managing ecosystems with deeply uncertain threshold responses and multiple decision makers poses nontrivial decision analytical challenges. The problem is imbued with deep uncertainties because decision makers do not know or cannot converge on a single probability density function for each key parameter, a perfect model structure, or a single adequate objective. The existing literature on manag...

This paper studies the patterns of trade and the incentives to innovate in an unequal global economy. We introduce non-homothetic preferences in a general-equilibrium model of endogenous growth and international trade between two countries, and argue that the effects of market integration on the consequent trade patterns and the incentives to innovate depend on the degree of income inequality a...

Market Structure and the Demand for Free Trade ABSTRACT We explore the interplay of market structure and government trade policy in the context of a heterogenous goods duopoly model (allowing for goods to be substitutes or complements) wherein governments simultaneously and noncooperatively choose whether or not to provide subsidies for their firms and then firms noncooperatively choose output ...

This paper proposes a new theoretical framework for studying the patterns of trade between rich and poor countries by incorporating nonhomothetic preferences into the standard home market effect models of trade. It has a continuum of Dixit-Stiglitz monopolistic competitive sectors with iceberg trade costs. There are two countries, which may differ in their per capita labor endowment and the pop...