Utilitarian Social Planner Research Articles

Sufficient conditions for a “simple” decentralization with consumption externalities

We consider a pure exchange economy with consumption externalities in preferences. We use the notion of competitive equilibrium à la Nash. We provide the Social Redistribution assumption to restore the Second Welfare Theorem. We then introduce the differentiable characterizations of Social and Strong Redistribution. We show that all these conditions are weaker than other relevant assumptions studied in the literature. Our conditions entail interesting results on the decentralized implementation of Pareto optima, that link together the competitive supporting price and the shadow price of the utilitarian social planner. Finally, we provide a specific condition for Bergson-Samuelson utility functions, which has a nice interpretation in terms of positive or negative externalities.

Boosting taxes for boasting about houses? Status concerns in the housing market

In this paper we investigate the implications for housing taxation when households have status concerns for residential housing. For this purpose we introduce a residential housing sector and status concerns for housing into a neoclassical model with heterogeneous agents. First, finding that status concerns exert a negative externality, we calculate a progressive Pigovian tax schedule that corrects for the externality. Implementing the tax schedule is associated with a moderate aggregate welfare gain, but has a sizable and diverse impact on household groups’ welfare. Second, we find that when the utilitarian social planner is constrained to housing taxes, Pigovian taxation is not constraint efficient. We show that the welfare maximizing tax of the constrained optimum is always higher than the Pigovian tax, and we analyze the mechanism behind this finding. Our results have strong implications for the optimal taxation of residential housing.

Old age or dependence: Which social insurance?

AbstractIn recent decades, there has been an increase in life expectancy and a rapid increase of the very senior dependency ratio in developed countries. In this context, we examine the optimal levels of public pensions and public long‐term care (LTC) insurance. According to the most reasonable estimates of correlations among individual incomes, risks of mortality and dependency, we show that it is always desirable for a utilitarian social planner to have a balanced budget increase in LTC benefits at the expense of public pension benefits, until the cost of LTC is fully covered. This is true with or without liquidity constraints. For a Rawlsian planner, the balance between the two schemes depends on a comparison of the ratio of the survival probability to the dependence risk of the poor with its population average.

Boosting Taxes for Boasting About Houses? Status Concerns in the Housing Market

There is empirical evidence that households use residential houses as status goods. In particular, people are shown to compare their houses with those at the top of the distribution. In this paper, we introduce a residential housing sector and status concerns for housing into a neoclassical model with heterogeneous agents. We find that status concerns exert a negative externality and calculate a progressive Pigovian tax schedule that corrects for the externality, implying a housing tax for rich households of 4.6%. Implementing the tax schedule is associated with a sizable welfare gain. We also find that when the utilitarian social planner is constrained to housing taxes, Pigovian taxation is not constrained efficient. Further increasing the tax for rich households to 7.9% would maximize welfare in the constrained optimum.

Network Cycles and Welfare

In a wide variety of social settings (e.g. crime, education, political activism, technology adoption), players’ returns to their efforts depend on how much effort others exert. Modeling these situations as a network game with strategic complementarities, we show that a player’s cycle centrality — a weighted sum of the number of network cycles that she is in — determines the extent to which she benefits from her complementarities with others. In contrast to the widely-used Bonacich centrality — which measures how efforts propagate through the network — cycle centrality measures how the variance of efforts propagates through the network. A utilitarian social planner who can incentivize one player’s effort targets the one with the highest cycle centrality.

On the equilibrium and welfare consequences of getting ahead of the Smiths

AbstractThis paper provides an analysis of the social consequences of people seeking to get ahead of the Smiths. All individuals attempt to reach a higher rank than the Smiths, including the Smiths themselves. This attitude gives rise to an equilibrium in which all individuals have equal utilities but unequal (gross) incomes. Due to a rat‐race effect, individuals devote too much energy to climbing the social scale. However, laissez‐faire equilibrium is an equal‐utility constrained social optimum. Conversely, a utilitarian social planner would not choose utility equality. Unexpectedly, this social ambition theory fairly well accounts for empirical intermediate wage inequality.

On the Dynamics of Beliefs and Risky Sexual Behavior

This paper analyzes the dynamic interplay between individuals beliefs over transmission risks and their decisions on whether to engage in unprotected sexual behavior. The infectious disease is (possibly) asymptomatic, which makes the inference problem non-trivial. In general, the dynamics of beliefs can be non-monotone in time, even without shifts in actions. Both monogamous and concurrent relationships are considered. It is shown that if unprotected sex is voluntary, then a utilitarian social planner would prefer more unprotected sex than the level chosen in equilibrium. Furthermore, it is shown that altruism towards the partner will increase the amount of voluntary unprotected sex and thus increase the amount of infection.

Continuous decisions by a committee: Median versus average mechanisms

A group of strategic agents with diverse private information and interdependent preferences has to take a continuous collective decision. I study the design of the decision-making procedure from the viewpoint of a utilitarian social planner. For uniformly distributed information, the implementation of the average report as decision dominates the implementation of the median report when the set of admissible reports is optimally designed. This is true for any number of agents and for any degree of interdependence. The result extends to a general class of distributions when the number of agents is large.

Becker Meets Ricardo: Multisector Matching with Communication and Cognitive Skills

This article presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in education and labor markets when individuals have heterogeneous communication and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and coordination between team members. Individuals accumulate cognitive skills in schools when young. As adults, they decide whether to work as a manager or a worker in a firm or become a teacher in a school. Individuals with more communication skills will become either managers or teachers and earn higher wages. Each manager manages several workers and each teacher teaches several students, with their span of control being determined by their communication skill. These individuals also invest discretely more in education than marginally different individuals who become workers. Equilibrium is equivalent to the solution of an utilitarian social planner solving a linear programming problem.

Reconciling the Rawlsian and the utilitarian approaches to the maximization of social welfare

Under a deadweight loss of tax and transfer, there is tension between the optimal policy choices of a Rawlsian social planner and a utilitarian social planner. However, when with a weight greater than a certain critical value the individuals’ utility functions incorporate distaste for low relative income, a utilitarian will select exactly the same income distribution as a Rawlsian.

Reconciling the Rawlsian and the Utilitarian Approaches to the Maximization of Social Welfare

Under a deadweight loss of tax and transfer, there is tension between the optimal policy choices of a Rawlsian social planner and a utilitarian social planner. However, when with a weight greater than a certain critical value the individuals’ utility functions incorporate distaste for low relative income, a utilitarian will select exactly the same income distribution as a Rawlsian.

Choosing Choices: Agenda Selection With Uncertain Issues

We study selection rules: voting procedures used by committees to choose whether to place an issue on their agenda. At the selection stage of the model, committee members are uncertain about their final preferences. They only have some private information about these preferences. We show that voters become more conservative when the selection rule itself becomes more conservative. The decision rule has the opposite effect. We compare these voting procedures to the designation of an agenda setter among the committee and to a utilitarian social planner with all the ex interim private information.

Becker Meets Ricardo: Multisector Matching with Social and Cognitive Skills

This paper presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in school, work, and marriage when individuals have heterogeneous social and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and coordination between team members, and individuals with more social skills communicate and coordinate at lower resource cost. The theory delivers full task specialization in the labor and education markets, but incomplete specialization in marriage. It also captures well-known matching patterns in each of these sectors, including the commonly observed many-to-one matches in firms and schools. Equilibrium is equivalent to the solution of an utilitarian social planner solving a linear programming problem.

Becker Meets Ricardo: Multisector Matching with Social and Cognitive Skills

This paper presents a tractable framework for studying frictionless matching in school, work, and marriage when individuals have heterogeneous social and cognitive skills. In the model, there are gains to specialization and team production, but specialization requires communication and coordination between team members, and individuals with more social skills communicate and coordinate at lower resource cost. The theory delivers full task specialization in the labor and education markets, but incomplete specialization in marriage. It also captures well-known matching patterns in each of these sectors, including the commonly observed many-to-one matches in firms and schools. Equilibrium is equivalent to the solution of an utilitarian social planner solving a linear programming problem.

A concern about low relative income, and the alignment of utilitarianism with egalitarianism

A utilitarian social planner who maximizes social welfare assigns the available income to those who are most efficient in converting income into utility. However, when individuals are concerned about their income falling behind the incomes of others, the optimal income distribution under utilitarianism is equality of incomes.

Survival, reproduction and congestion: the spaceship problem re-examined

This paper re-examines the spaceship problem, i.e. the design of the optimal population under a fixed living space, by focusing on the dilemma between adding new beings and extending the life of existing beings. For that purpose, we characterize, under time-additive individual welfare depending negatively on population density, the preference ordering of a utilitarian social planner over lifetime-equal histories, i.e. histories with demographic conditions yielding an equal finite number of life-periods (imposed by resources constraints). The analysis of the spaceship problem contradicts widespread beliefs about the populationism of Classical Utilitarianism and the antipopulationism of Average Utilitarianism. We also study the invariance property exhibited by various utilitarian rankings to the total space available and to individual preferences. Finally, we compare histories for a spaceship with a stationary population, and try to accomodate intuitions about posterity and renewal of populations.

Time-Consistent Majority Rules and Heterogenous Preferences in Group Decision-Making

This paper studies a collective decision problem in which a group of individuals with interdependent preferences vote whether or not to implement a public project of unknown value. A utilitarian social planner aggregates these votes according to a majority rule; but, unlike what is commonly assumed in the literature, the planner is unable to commit to the rule before votes are cast. Characterizing the time-consistent majority rules, we find that the ex ante optimal majority rule is time-consistent; but for groups whose members have sufficiently homogenous preferences, there is an ex ante suboptimal rule that is also time-consistent. Thus, in the absence of an ex ante commitment, the social planner prefers a relatively heterogeneous group in which strategic voting incentives are weak. This finding is in sharp contrast with the observation that under an exogenously given majority rule, the social planner prefers the most homogenous group. Applications to trial jury and advisory committee formations as well as academic hiring decisions are discussed.

Longevity, Health Spending, and Pay-as-you-Go Pensions

This paper aims at investigating whether or not a utilitarian social planner should subsidize longevity-enhancing expenditures in an economy with a pay-as-you-go pension system. For that purpose, a two-period overlapping-generations model is developed, in which the probability of survival to the second period can be raised by private health spending. Focusing on the steady state, it is shown that the sign of the optimal subsidy on health expenditures tends to be negative when the replacement ratio is sufficiently large. Moreover, the optimal health subsidy is also shown to depend significantly on individual preferences and on the longevity production process.

Longevity and Pay-as-You-Go Pensions

This paper aims at investigating whether or not a utilitarian social planner should subsidize longevity-enhancing expenditures in an economy with a PAYG pension system. For that purpose, a simple two-period OLG model is developed, in which the length of the second period of life can be raised by private health spendings. Focussing on the steady-state, it is shown that the sign of the optimal subsidy on health expenditures tends to be negative when the replacement ratio is sufficiently large. Moreover, the optimal health subsidy is also shown to depend significantly on the longevity production process and on the production technology.

Statistical Treatment Rules for Heterogeneous Populations

An important objective of empirical research on treatment response is to provide decision makers with information useful in choosing treatments. This paper studies minimax-regret treatment choice using the sample data generated by a classical randomized experiment. Consider a utilitarian social planner who must choose among the feasible statistical treatment rules, these being functions that map the sample data and observed covariates of population members into a treatment allocation. If the planner knew the population distribution of treatment response, the optimal treatment rule would maximize mean welfare conditional on all observed covariates. The appropriate use of covariate information is a more subtle matter when only sample data on treatment response are available. I consider the class of conditional empirical success rules; that is, rules assigning persons to treatments that yield the best experimental outcomes conditional on alternative subsets of the observed covariates. I derive a closed-form bound on the maximum regret of any such rule. Comparison of the bounds for rules that condition on smaller and larger subsets of the covariates yields sufficient sample sizes for productive use of covariate information. When the available sample size exceeds the sufficiency boundary, a planner can be certain that conditioning treatment choice on more covariates is preferable (in terms of minimax regret) to conditioning on fewer covariates.