Innovation by users is now understood to be an important part of innovative activity in the economy. In this paper we explore the implications of adding innovation by users to existing models of social welfare that currently assume innovation by manufacturers only. We find this addition removes several inefficiencies, and that social welfare is likely to be increased by the presence of user inn...

We present a formal logic of social welfare functions. The logical language is syntactically simple, but expressive enough to express interesting and complicated properties of social welfare functions involving, e.g., quantification over both preference relations and over individual alternatives, such as Arrow’s thorem.

BACKGROUND The paper describes the origins of the Value of Children (VOC) approach to the cross-cultural research on fertility behavior around the Pacific Rim, and critically discusses its shortcomings at this stage. OBJECTIVE The paper then demonstrates how the approach derives its theoretical coherence from the theory of social production functions, making reference to empirical evidence. RES...

We consider a Cournot oligopoly model where multiple suppliers (oligopolists) compete by choosing quantities. We compare the social welfare achieved at a Cournot equilibrium to the maximum possible, for the case where the inverse market demand function is convex. We establish a lower bound on the efficiency of Cournot equilibria in terms of a scalar parameter derived from the inverse demand fun...

Tax fairness is a normative concept. Economists have spent decades in search of the elusive social welfare function. Tax policy specialists ponder the proper manner in which to present tables about tax burdens. And politicians try to ascertain or, in some cases, shape attitudes about desirable tax burdens. Lurking behind all three activities is the public itself. It is ultimately public attitud...

This paper considers the social welfare implications of having a public rating agency in-stead of private sector credit rating agencies. The public rating agency is assumed to pay a fix compensation rather than a performance sensitive compensation and is assumed to dismiss its employee in case of "misconduct." The model predicts that the public rating agency may be socially beneficial if invest...

political trust addresses the relation between people and state. researches say political trust has had a declining trend in iran since the victory of the revolution. religion is among the factors which affect political trust, and has been emphasized in the theories of the classical and contemporary sociologists and social capital theorists. this fact is more considerable in iran where a religi...

Social network formation models are often compared by their network structures, which satisfy specific equilibrium or welfare properties. Here, we concentrate on welfare criteria and define properties of utility function which are causal for certain network structures. We hope the identification of different properties of utility function will enhance the understanding of the relationship of di...

We study a model of political economy in which the policy choice of an incumbent politician when he is concerned with the perception of his capability. We show that politicians may engage in socially detrimental reform in order to be perceived as more capable. Conservative institutions that thwart reform may potentially improve social welfare.