introduction: market power is an important factor affecting welfare. existence of market power on the purchase side reduces supplier welfare. however, existence of market power on the sales side reduces supplier welfare. some believe that the agricultural market structure is a monopoly. in fact, most of the agricultural products can be purchased by small firms and then delivered to consumers be...

Direct practice social workers today are challenged to address the requirements of the complex array of professional, organizational, institutional, and regulatory demands placed on them in the broader socioeconomic context of fewer resources and diminished public support for social welfare services in the United States. The common factors model provides an accessible, transtheoretical, empiric...

Is it better to live in a big country than a small one? In this paper, I examine whether economic and social conditions vary systematically with the population of a country. Economics provides a number of theoretical reasons why country size should matter, for instance, because of increasing returns to scale or because it is easier to provide public goods to a larger populace. However, there is...

In this paper we study the social preferences obtained from monotone neutral social welfare functions for random individual preferences. It turns out that there are two extreme types of behavior. On one side, there are social welfare functions, such as the majority rule, that lead to stochastic stability of the outcome in terms of perturbations of individual preferences. We identify and study a...

A multiagent system may be regarded as an artificial society of autonomous software agents. Welfare economics provides formal models of how the distribution of resources amongst the members of a society affects the well-being of that society as a whole. In multiagent systems research, the concept of social welfare is usually given a utilitarian interpretation, i.e. whatever increases the averag...

We consider social welfare functions that satisfy Arrow’s classic axioms of independence of irrelevant alternatives and Pareto optimality when the outcome space is the convex hull over some finite set of alternatives. Individual and collective preferences are assumed to be continuous and convex, which guarantees the existence of maximal elements and the consistency of choice functions that retu...

OBJECTIVES We reviewed applications of big data analysis of healthcare and social services in developed countries, and subsequently devised a framework for such an analysis in Korea. METHODS We reviewed the status of implementing big data analysis of health care and social services in developed countries, and strategies used by the Ministry of Health and Welfare of Korea (Government 3.0). We ...