Welfare Judgments Research Articles

Who needs key skills? Part 3

: This is the third in a series of three scenario-based articles covering professional skills topics that are highly relevant to the veterinary nurse in practice today. The article explores the ethical, welfare, communication and professional aspects of the case. The purpose is to provide veterinary nurses with an outline of the considerations that should be addressed in order to make informed decisions and maintain professional integrity, taking into account welfare judgements, client wishes, and personal ethical views. The scenario presented is that of performing ovariohysterectomy on pregnant cats.

Quantitative verification of the correspondence between the Welfare Quality® operational definition of farm animal welfare and the opinion of Flemish farmers, citizens and vegetarians

The Welfare Quality® project has developed an operational definition of farm animal welfare, which consists of 12 criteria grouped into four principles (‘good feeding’, ‘good housing’, ‘good health’ and ‘appropriate behaviour’). As part of a larger survey, 204 farmers, 72 vegetarians, and a representative sample of 459 adult citizens in Flanders (Belgium) scored the importance of each of the 12 criteria on a 1–10 scale, and divided 100 points across the four principles according to the perceived relative weights for farm animal welfare. These data were analysed to verify quantitatively whether (1) the grouping of 12 criteria into the four principles, and (2) the relative weights used by Welfare Quality® for aggregating the 12 criteria into an overall welfare judgement correspond with the perception of these three stakeholder groups from a region and setting not previously covered by Welfare Quality® studies. Moreover, the effects of various socio-demographic variables on the importance allocated to the welfare criteria and principles were investigated. Vegetarians and females gave consistently higher importance scores to all 12 criteria as compared with farmers, citizens and males, respectively, particularly for the (criteria belonging to the) principle ‘appropriate behaviour’. Farmers allocated more weight to ‘good feeding’ than did vegetarians or citizens. These differences confirm that farmers view animal welfare more in terms of biological functioning (instead of affective states or natural living) as compared to other citizens, and vegetarians in particular. As the concept has a different meaning to different people, any operational definition of animal welfare is unlikely to match equally well with the perception of every single stakeholder group or person. The structure of the Welfare Quality® operational definition with the 12 criteria aggregated into four principles, corresponds well with the opinion of the stakeholders as they judged all 12 criteria as rather important to extremely important for farm animal welfare. Factor analysis restricted to contain four factors confirmed the grouping of the criteria into the correct principles. Exploratory factor analysis using Eigenvalues > 1 as extraction criterion indicated, however, that from the citizen perspective two principles (‘good feeding & health’ and ‘appropriate behaviour & housing’) rather than four would suffice. The main discrepancy with the Welfare Quality® approach concerns the aggregation procedure: the stakeholders did not consider all four principles as equally important, and the relative importance allocated to criteria corresponded poorly across principles. Some of these discrepancies were consistent across the three different stakeholder groups.

Behavioral Decisions and Welfare

We study decision problems where (a) preference parameters are de.ned to include psychological/moral considerations and (b) there is a feedback effect from chosen actions to preference parameters. In a standard decision problem the chosen action is required to be optimal when the feedback effect from actions to preference parameters is fully taken into account. In a behavioural decision problem the chosen action is optimal taking preference parameters as given although chosen actions and preference parameters are required to be mutually consistent. Our framework unifes seemingly disconnected papers in the literature. We characterize the conditions under which behavioural and standard decisions problems are indistinguishable: in smooth settings, the two decision problems are generically distinguishable. We show that in general, revealed preferences cannot be used for making welfare judgements and we characterize the conditions under which they can inform welfare analysis. We provide an existence result for the case of incomplete preferences. We suggest novel implications for policy and welfare analysis.

Liberal Egalitarianism and the Harm Principle

This paper analyses the implications of classical liberal and libertarian approaches for distributive justice in the context of social welfare orderings. An axiom capturing a liberal non-interfering view of society, named the Weak Harm Principle, is studied, whose roots can be traced back to John Stuart Mill's essay On Liberty. It is shown that liberal views of individual autonomy and freedom can provide consistent foundations for social welfare judgements, in both the finite and the infinite context. In particular, a liberal non-interfering approach can help to adjudicate some fundamental distributive issues relative to intergenerational justice. However, a surprisingly strong and general relation is established between liberal views of individual autonomy and non-interference, and egalitarian principles in the Rawlsian tradition.

The Efficiency of Equity

In standard neoclassical economics, efficiency and equity issues are largely treated as separate and separable issues. While this has been challenged within and outside the neoclassical tradition for some time, this paper argues that four recent strands of literature largely within the neoclassical tradition provide a solid empirical foundation for this challenge. These four strands refer to: (1) findings from the experimental literature on the importance of equity or fairness; (2) the subjective well-being literature on the importance of relative incomes and inequality on subjective well-being; (3) the distribution-adjusted well-being literature that combines measures of mean incomes with measures of income inequality to derive welfare judgments across space and time; and (4) the literature on the relationship between income and gender inequality and economic growth. All of these literatures provide a sound empirical basis for arguing that greater equity is critical for greater efficiency.

Monopoly Prices versus Ramsey-Boiteux Prices: Are they Similar, and: Does it Matter?

Ramsey-Boiteux prices and monopoly prices are frequently regarded as being similar. This might suggest that, in particular in network industries with large fixed costs, sometimes monopoly pricing is close to the Ramsey-Boiteux second best and welfare superior to imperfectly regulated prices. This paper tries to specify what is meant by being similar, and it analyzes the welfare implications that can be drawn from comparing both sets of prices. Interdependence of demand and the impact of competition are discussed. We reinforce the view that monopoly prices are usually not similar, and even if they are, this implies no positive welfare judgments on monopoly pricing.

The Choice of Index Number: Part I, Valuation and Evaluation

This paper defines and discusses the choices that are implicit in alternative approaches to constructing index numbers. The central theoretical result is the exogeneity theorem, which states that an index number system possesses certain generally desirable properties, associated with meaningfulness, relevance and consistency if and only if it admits of a welfare interpretation that is invariant to the data to which it is applied. An index number system that does not permit a fixed welfare interpretation of this kind will fail to possess these properties. Moreover, it will not be possible to undertake meaningful multilateral comparisons between all possible units of comparison to which the index number system may be applied without adopting a meta-evaluative criterion that expresses welfare judgments concerning the relation between distinct evaluative standards. Therefore, explicit or implicit normative judgments are inescapable in the construction and use of index numbers intended to permit meaningful comparisons over an unrestricted domain. We identify a set of bounds on the index numbers that an index number system produces (the generalized within bounds requirement) which define necessary and sufficient conditions for them to be rationalizable (i.e. to possess a welfare interpretation). However, multilateral index number systems that are widely in use violate this and other requirements of the exogeneity theorem. As a result, the index numbers they produce do not admit of a welfare interpretation which is invariant to the data to which they are applied, and indeed may not admit of any welfare interpretation at all. The exogeneity theorem establishes that the rationale for exact index number systems is much less compelling than widely believed. A fixed welfare interpretation is also a necessary and sufficient condition for the path-independence of the Divisia index. The theorem therefore establishes a three-way equivalence between desirable properties of continuous index number systems, desirable properties of discrete index number systems and the existence of a fixed welfare interpretation.

Welfare-Spending Judgments Through Class, Race, and Gender Lenses: Exploring the Influence of Stratification Beliefs, Racial Attitudes, and Gender Norms

ABSTRACT As politicians in the 1990s shrank welfare appropriations and tinkered with eligibility rules, many researchers examined American welfare attitudes. In doing so, separate lines of research argued that welfare-spending inclinations can be swayed by a person's class, race and gender statuses. Moreover, different studies connected welfare appraisals to a person's explanation of poverty, racial inequalities and gender hierarchies. As these inquiries provide critical insights these insights were hampered by a lack of theoretical breadth since they coalesced around a small set of independent variables. In effect, while theoreticians have linked class, race and gender matters, published quantitative works have routinely focused on only one set of class, race, or gender variables (i.e., numerous researchers consider welfare preferences in light of class and race interpretations as they neglect gender matters, or vice versa). In realizing that welfare attitudes probably emerge from all of these factors, this paper incorporates class, race and gender variables into a single explanatory model. With such a synthesis, this paper explores the welfare attitudes of college students from twelve randomly selected colleges (n = 575). In running a multivariate regression which explores the direct and separate contributions of each variable, the students' demographic affiliations seem to play a minimal role. Instead, attitudinal measures presented some significant results (especially the acceptance of modern racism, feminism and the belief of an open employment system). Thus, it seems that welfare antagonism was not contingent upon membership in certain race or gender groupings. Instead, welfare judgments were shaped by the perceived legitimacy of conventional class, race, and gender arrangements.

Vocalization of farm animals as a measure of welfare

Emotionally relevant external events, hormone concentrations affecting mood and appetitive behaviour, thirst and hunger are able to stimulate a complex central nervous network that regulates endocrine feedback and behaviour in order to maintain or regain homeostasis. Particular states of mood or emotion may thus be accompanied by specific behaviours, vocalization being one of them. Hence, in farm animals vocalizations may supply us with hints on their well-being in an easy way, given that the meanings of the respective calls are well-established. Then, it is possible to judge acoustically uttered current needs and impaired welfare by non-invasive, continuous monitoring. Vocalizations may also modulate emotions of the receivers such that welfare may also be affected in conspecifics hearing distress utterances, e.g., in an abattoir. For these reasons, the analysis of farm animal vocalization has gained increasing interest in the last years and a variety of attempts to decode the meaning has been made. Concentrating on important farm animal species (pig, cattle, poultry) an overview of the present state-of-the-art in this discipline is given and present problems as well as possible future developments are discussed. Modern techniques of sound analysis have provided tools to discriminate, analyse and classify specific vocalizations. Taking advantage of this, future bioacoustical research for welfare assessment should focus on comprehensive studies of a broad spectrum of species specific distress vocalizations. Increasingly precise attributions of such utterances to environments, behavioural contexts and relevant physiological parameters will lead to a deeper understanding of their meaning and significance with respect to well-being of farm animals. The result will offer applicable acoustic tools for farming environments where non-invasive techniques for welfare judgements are urgently needed.

The propensity of cattle to vocalise during handling and isolation is affected by phenotype

We investigated whether phenotype affects vocal and behavioural responses of newly-weaned beef calves during handling situations and whether vocal response differs between two types of handling situation. The phenotypic characteristic chosen was hair colour. Steers were classified into four groups, completely black animals (designated “Type 1A”, N=121), black animals with white markings (“Type 1B”, N=35), completely white animals (“Type 2A”, N=114) and white-faced animals with some degree of tan or light brown body colouration (“Type 2B”, N=37). In trial 1, vocalisations of all 307 steers were individually recorded for 1 min, while each was restrained for ear-tagging, ear-implantation of a growth promotant, rectal temperature measurement, vaccination and placement of electrodes for subsequent heart rate measurement. The proportion of calves vocalising was 36.2%. This proportion varied among phenotype groups ( P=0.042). More Type 1A (45.4%) than Type 2A animals (29.8%) vocalised ( P=0.014). Calls did not differ between phenotype groupings in any acoustic properties. In trial 2, conducted on days 2 and 3 after trial 1, 111 of the steers tested in trial 1 were confined individually, in visual isolation on a scale platform for 1 min. Heart rate was measured at the beginning and end of this period. Vocal behaviour was recorded and movement was measured using an electronic device connected to the load sensing circuit of the scale. During isolation 16.2% of steers vocalised; a smaller proportion than in trial 1 ( P=0.0001). Type 1 cattle (1A and 1B combined) tended to be more vocal than Type 2 (22.4 and 9.4%, respectively, vocalised, P=0.0639) There were no phenotype-related differences in movement. Type 1 cattle tended to have higher initial heart rates (151.4±3.7 versus 140.7±2.8 beats/min, P=0.063) and greater reduction in heart rate (27.4±1.9 versus 22.9±1.7 beats/min, P=0.076) over the 1 min than Type 2. The amount of movement positively correlated with heart rate. Calves that vocalised showed greater reduction in heart rates than silent calves (32.4±2.1 versus 24.5±1.4 beats/min, P=0.0373). Cattle that vocalised during trial 1 were more likely to vocalise during trial 2 ( P=0.0373). Calls recorded during trial 2 were shorter (1.29±0.16 s versus 1.80±0.1 s, P=0.0075) with lower fundamental frequencies (88.1±2.8 Hz versus 136.8±10.9 Hz, P=0.001) than during trial 1. These results indicate that there are differences in the propensity to vocalise between phenotypic groups. This should be considered when making welfare judgements based on a proportion of animals that vocalise. Acoustic properties of calls differ between conditions and may provide information about how those conditions affect the internal states of the animals.

Contract, Property and the Role of Metaphor in Corporations Law

Cognitive scientists have described the role of metaphor as the attempt to understand one domain of knowledge (the target) in terms of another (the source). Corporations scholarship is currently dominated by a metaphor which attempts to explain corporations in terms of This metaphor derives from the economic model of the as a set of contracts. The legal version of the metaphor exhibits confusion about both its target and its source. The economic concept of the is not equivalent to the legal concept of the corporation. Nor is the economic contract, a voluntary reciprocal relationship, equivalent to the legal contract, a legally enforceable relationship that is partly, but not entirely, based on voluntary consent. Contractarian discourse uses the term contract loosely, however, and conflates voluntariness and enforceability. The contractarian metaphor helps show that the firm is not a black box whose characteristics are immune from market forces. But it wrongly suggests that individual choice is the basis for the legitimacy of all legally enforceable corporate relationships. The metaphor masks the fact that the rules of corporate are often based on social welfare judgments of judges, lawmakers and regulators rather than on parties' bargains in the marketplace. It misleadingly suggests that the imposes no value judgments but merely rubber-stamps freely made individual decisions. Thus the model lulls us into thinking we can avoid the hard questions of how the makes its value judgments. Because the concept of property includes rights and duties not based on assent, a property-based metaphor for corporations can help put the law back into this branch of private law.

Individual preferences and social justice

The article examines John Harsanyi's influential account on welfarism, according to which the satisfaction of individual preferences ought to be seen as the ultimate foundation of our social welfare (or social justice) judgments. The author argues that welfarism provides a very defective morality and that we should strive to identify a non-subjective moral foundation to interpersonal comparison of well-being.

Consequences, opportunities, and procedures

This paper reflects on consequentialism which underlies the traditional normative economics. It asserts that the informational basis of normative economics should be expanded so that the intrinsic value of social choice procedures should be properly taken into account along with the value of their consequences. Three examples – the problem of fair cake division, the role of competition in the promotion of economic welfare, and bilateral trade restrictions – are invoked to pinpoint the services rendered by procedural considerations in making social welfare judgements. The Pareto libertarian paradox is also re-examined within the extended framework incorporating procedural considerations along with consequential considerations.

A Pair of Social Welfare Functions and a New Measure of Inequality

Welfare judgement on income distribution has often been made on the basis of weighted sum of individual incomes, the weights being based on some notion of relative deprivation. In a recent contribution to this Journal, Chakrabarty (1995) proposed a set of weights leading to a Social Welfare Function (SWF) based on Theil's entropy measure, not normalised. This paper proposes two more sets of weights leading to a pair of SWFs with similar properties and interpretations. Properties of a new measure of inequality derived from these SWFs are also scrutinised.

Observations on technical change and paretian welfare economics

This article brings together two major topics of economic theory: technical change and Paretian welfare economics. Until now, the tendency has been to study these topics separately. By introducing economic search behaviour in the first phase of technical change, the analysis of technical change is broadened by means of a link between this behaviour and so-called virtual goods. The concept of Pareto optimality is broadened by expanding the space of goods with new and virtual goods. The question is whether the generalized Paretian theory makes it possible to compareex post equilibria after the process of technical change with theex post situation before this process takes place. Although generalized Pareto optimality does not allow a welfare judgement on aprocess of technical change, the theory still provides us with an explanation for the allocation of resources of R&D in terms of consumer preferences and with an analytical device to compare actual economic structures with a generalized Pareto optimum in a static setting.

Conservatism and Perceptions of Poverty: An Attributional Analysis1

Attribution theory was used to relate causal explanations for poverty to affect and behavioral intentions. In Experiment 1, student subjects rated 13 causes of poverty on importance, the attribution of controllability, blame, affects of pity and anger, and judgments of help‐giving (personal help and welfare). Two individual differences, conservatism and the belief in a just world, were also assessed. A principal components analysis categorized the causes into three types: individualistic, societal, and fatalistic. Conservatism correlated positively with a belief in the importance of individualistic causes, controllability, blame, and anger, and it correlated negatively with perceptions of the importance of societal causes, pity, and intentions to help. No systematic effects of the belief in a just world emerged. A structural equation analysis revealed that personal help is emotionally determined, whereas welfare judgments are directly related to attributions of responsibility and political ideology. Experiment 2 revealed a similar pattern of results using a nonstudent sample.

Welfare, preference and freedom

This paper is concerned with the informational foundation of welfare-economic evaluation and the empirical bases of social welfare judgments. More particularly, it is concerned with the empirical implications of basing social evaluation on individual freedom, as opposed to individual welfare. This involves a substantial shift from the informational focus of standard welfare economics, with its dominant tradition of ‘welfarism’. While the claims of individual preferences to be in the informational base of social welfare judgments are frequently seen as parasitic on welfarism, the claims relate more robustly to freedom-based social evaluation. In an axiomatic examination, it is argued that preference and freedom are very deeply interrelated, and that an affirmation of the intrinsic importance of freedom must inter alia assign fundamental importance to preference. This goes against some common presumptions about assesing freedom, and also against some axioms that have been proposed in the literature on ‘measuring freedom’.

Welfare analysis under uncertainty

This article extends Bergsonian welfare analysis to an environment of uncertainty where preferences are not expected utility and may even be state-inconsistent. Given state-inconsistent preferences, the familiar notion of ex ante efficiency is also state-inconsistent. Other efficiency and welfare concepts achieve state consistency by ignoring entirely the prospective preferences of consumers. The framework developed in this article allows welfare judgments to be state-consistent while respecting prospective and conditional preferences. The theory is called inclusive welfare. An application to optimum insurance subsidies illustrates the practical use of the concept.

The consistency of welfare judgments with a representative consumer

It is common practice to use the representative consumer hypothesis without specifically assuming any of the sufficient conditions under which one will exist. We show, first, that it is possible for the utility of the representative consumer to increase when every actual consumer is made worse off. Second, in economies where this does not occur, there exists a social welfare function, which we construct, which is consistent with welfare judgments based on the utility of the representative consumer. Finally, we provide a converse to Samuelson's 1956 representative consumer result.

Interpreting inequality measures in a Harsanyi framework

In the Harsanyi framework, social welfare judgements are made behind a veil of ignorance. The Atkinson, Kolm, Generalized Entropy, and Bourguignon-Shorrock indices of economic inequality can be interpreted as measures of the riskiness of an income distribution when viewed from behind a veil of ignorance. The advantages of interpreting these inequality measures in the Harsanyi framework are discussed.