Halmstad University's profile as the University of Innovation consists of the strong area of Health and Lifestyle. As many European societies are characterized by societal challenges, this strong area will turn out to be an area of research that has strong future relevance. Challenges related to an aging population, increased mental illness among young people, mar-ginalization of disabled peopl...

The close confinement of sows in barren environmental conditions gives rise to major public concern for their welfare. Such concern has resulted in EU legislation to ban individual confinement systems for the majority of gestation, and strong pressures to find alternatives to the farrowing crate for lactating sows. Many alternative loose housing systems for dry sows exist, and have been in wide...

The logsum formula, which provides the expected maximum utility for the multinomial logit model, is often used as a measure of welfare. We provide here a closed form formula of the welfare measure of an individual who has not access to his first-best choice, but has access to his rth-best choice, r = 2, ...n, where n is the number of alternatives. The derivation is based on a standard identity ...

We propose a decomposition of social welfare when consumers have quasi-linear utility functions under certain conditions satisfied in many models of imperfect competition. In our decomposition, social welfare is expressed as the sum of consumers’ gross utilities and trade surplus of non-numeraire commodities, which contribute to consumers’ utilities non-linearly. This decomposition is useful es...

In view of the distinct and seminal contributions of Pareto and Pigou to the economics of welfare, Pigou’s enduring influence in the field of public finance and Pareto’s hostility to developments in that field of study, the lack of a comparative study of their contributions is unfortunate. This study contrasts the place of ophelimity and utility and in these authors’ approaches to welfare studi...

BACKGROUND Evaluating youth welfare services is vital, both because of the considerable influence they have on the development of children and adolescents, as well as owing to the extensive financial costs involved, especially for child residential care. In this naturalistic study we have undertaken to evaluate changes in various behaviors of young people who are in youth welfare institutions, ...

Science-based policy making and assessments are individualistic insofar as they are sensitive to interindividual differences, intraindividual connectivity, or both. Several scientists and policymakers have argued that nonhuman animal welfare should relate to individual animals, but there are reasons for both individualistic and nonindividualistic approaches. Opportunities to develop more indivi...

We describe recent advances in the empirical analysis of insurance markets. This new research proposes ways to estimate individual demand for insurance and the relationship between prices and insurer costs in the presence of adverse and advantageous selection. We discuss how these models permit the measurement of welfare distortions arising from asymmetric information and the welfare consequenc...

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...