A simple linear programming problem permits a brief and elementary proof of Harsanyi’s utilitarianism theorem: a Paretian social welfare function must be a weighted (affine) sum of individual utility functions when individual utilities and social welfare all take the Neumann–Morgenstern form. By adjusting the programming problem slightly, we conclude that the weights on individual utilities are...

Currently, welfare programs coordinate a range of services to support work among welfare recipients and help them overcome barriers to employment. This paper considers the relationship between spatial proximity to and utilization of support services among welfare recipients. Accessibility of mental health and substance abuse service providers among welfare recipients is examined in the three-co...

Social optimization problems are often used in economics to study important issues. In a social optimization problem, the sum of individual weighted utilities is maximized over all feasible allocations that satisfy certain constraints. In this paper, we provide a mechanism that determines the set of proper individual weights to be applied to social optimization problems. To do this, we first de...

Suppose that a social behaviour norm specifies ethical decisions at all decision nodes of every finite decision tree whose terminal nodes have consequences in a given domain. Suppose too that behaviour is both consistent in subtrees and continuous as probabilities vary. Suppose that the social consequence domain consists of profiles of individual consequences defined broadly enough so that only...

Social welfare orderings for different scales of individual utility measurement in distinct population subgroups are studied. In Khmelnitskaya and Weymark (2000), employing the continuous version of Arrow’s impossibility theorem, it was shown that for combinations of independent subgroups scales every corresponding social welfare ordering depends on the utilities of only one of the subgroups an...

This paper focuses on a neglected aspect of the treatment of the income unit in the construction of size distributions of income. If the size distribution is to be an indicator of the distribution of economic welfare,and if the economic welfare of each individual in society is to count equally, then conventional distribuFions are inconsistent with individualistic social welfare functions. We es...

Old welfare economics, Pigou (1920), considered social welfare as a cardinal notion, while new welfare economics,1 Little (1950) and Graaff (1957), consider social welfare as an ordinal notion. An in depth introduction to welfare economics and a discussion of the transition from old to new welfare economics, is expounded quite well by Samuelson (1947, Chap. 8, pp. 203–219, and pp. 249–252). For...

This paper examines the validity of a model that is embedded in a computer-based decision support system to assess the welfare status of pregnant sows in housing and management systems. The so-called SOWEL (SOw WELfare) model was constructed using a formalized procedure to identify and weight welfare-relevant attributes of housing systems in relation to the animal's needs, and evidenced by scie...

We analyse how the welfare state, i.e., social insurance that works through redistributive taxation, should respond to increases in risks and to increases in the cost of operating the welfare state. With respect to risks, we distinguish between risks that can be insured and such that cannot (background risks). Insurable risks can be reduced by costly individual selfinsurance and by costly socia...