and participants at a World Bank seminar, for useful comments. The views expressed here are mine and do not necessarily reflect those of the World Bank or its affiliated organizations. iii ABSTRACT Labor market integration is typically assumed to raise welfare in the absence of distortions because it allows labor to move to where returns are highest. This result is examined in a simple general ...

A central task in multiagent resource allocation, which provides mechanisms to allocate (bundles of) resources to agents, is to maximize social welfare. We assume resources to be indivisible and nonshareable and agents to express their utilities over bundles of resources, where utilities can be represented in the bundle form, the k-additive form, and as straight-line programs. We study the comp...

We model group formation as a response to relative deprivation. We employ a simple measure of relative deprivation. We show that the process of deprivationinduced self-selection into groups reaches a unique steady state. We study the social welfare implications of the deprivation-induced process of group formation and show that when individuals are left to pursue their betterment the resulting ...

Stress is ubiquitous in everyday life, and chronic stress can have negative consequences for health and social welfare. Although a growing body of research addresses the relationships between stress, health, and quality of life, there is a gap in the literature with regard to the effects of stress among women at midlife. The purpose of this commentary is to provide a brief history of stress res...

Using a random sample of individuals in rural Bangladesh, this paper investigates people's ethical preferences regarding relative values of lives when it comes to saving lives of individuals of different ages. By assuming that an individual has preferences concerning different states of the world, and that these preferences can be described by an individual social welfare function, the individu...

A different branch embraces interpersonal comparability. Many welfare economists, in various subfields such as optimal tax theory, growth theory, public finance, environmental economics, and social choice theory, employ “social welfare functions” (SWF) as a key tool. Let x, y, z, ... denote different possible outcomes, i.e., states of affairs. The SWF methodology assigns a utility number to eac...

We offer a tractable model of broadcast media as a three-sided platform, serving entertainment and news to viewers, commercial opportunities to advertisers, and electoral influence to politicians. We characterize the profitmaximization decision of a media firm, and study the effect on social welfare of changes in the value of electoral influence, via induced changes in commercial advertising, t...

Research and development and innovation has an indisputable role in increasing the economic competitiveness of a country or a region and also indirectly in creating social welfare (Pitti 2006). Theoretical and practical professionals have been interested in this issue for decades, what is more for centuries. However it was not always called research and development and innovation but simply tec...

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...