Freedom from thirst is one of the most undeniable welfare requirements. Nevertheless, the welfare implication of water deprivation because of a particular situation (e.g., transport) or as an involuntary consequence (e.g., sick, injured, or subordinate animals) remains unclear. This experiment investigated the behavioral changes in laying hens following various durations of water deprivation by...

We are interested in mechanisms that maximize the final social welfare. In [1] this problem was studied for multiunit auctions with unit demand bidders and for the public project problem, and in each case social welfare undominated mechanisms in the class of feasible and incentive compatible mechanisms were identified. One way to improve upon these optimality results is by relaxing the assumpti...

When firms can protect their innovations by secrecy or lead-time, the additional effect of patent protection is not obvious. This paper shows that when firms compete for a single innovation, patent protection still increases R&D investment but decreases social welfare due to over-investment. However, when firms compete for multiple complementary patents (called a patent portfolio), patent prote...

For the Cournot model, several authors studied the impact of a marginal cost variation on consumers’ surplus, firms’ profits and social welfare. We unify and extend the results when all the marginal costs change simultaneously, the direction and the magnitude of the variation being firm-specific.

Whether the US Constitution guarantees a right to conduct scientific research is a question that has never been squarely addressed by the United States Supreme Court. Similarly, the extent to which the First Amendment protects the right to communicate the results of scientific research is an issue about which there is scant judicial authority. This article suggests that a crucial guidepost for ...

Article history: Available online 26 March 2007 Empirical results from experimental economics and neuroscience have uncovered regularities in human behavior that may provide a base for new approaches to welfare theory and economic policy. These empirical findings do not challenge basic economic concepts but they do imply that our assumptions about “rational behavior”, “opportunity cost”, and “s...

Researchers who study violence against women often face problems when trying to understand the causes of individual changes in the context of group differences, targeted interventions, and institutional shifts. The authors explore these problems through research on the connections among women's earnings, welfare, and protection orders. The authors use multigroup, piecewise, latent growth curve ...

Our understanding of the ‘Golden Age’ of British retailing, during the period from the mid1970s through to the mid-1990s, has centred around a discussion of the impact that a rising retail concentration and a perceived increase in retailers’ market power has had on social welfare and competition policy. This increase in concentration and market power is itself understood to have evolved from th...

IN THE LITERATURE OF monopolistic third-degree price discrimination, it has been widely held that a change in aggregate Marshallian social welfare by price discrimination is negative if total output decreases. Among others, Schwartz [1990] verifies this conjecture for any total cost function that depends only on total output, not on its distribution among markets. Letting ∆X and ∆W denote a cha...

Communities and local health systems are some of the most visible and important resources in protecting and promoting the health of their citizens. The development of a community-oriented framework for providing health and human services oversight and planning is necessary to ensure appropriate access and services are available to meet local needs. This community-based orientation requires accu...