Welfare Subject Research Articles

Maximizing Social Welfare Subject to Network Externalities: A Unifying Submodular Optimization Approach

Maximizing Social Welfare Subject to Network Externalities: A Unifying Submodular Optimization Approach

DRL-Based Secure Aggregation and Resource Orchestration in MEC-Enabled Hierarchical Federated Learning

Federated learning (FL) provides a new paradigm for protecting data privacy by enabling model training at devices and model aggregation at servers. However, data information may be leaked to honest-but-curious aggregation servers by updated model parameters. The existing secure methods do not fully exploit the potentiality of data characteristics in enhancing security, which makes it impossible to optimize limited system resources overall to achieve secure, fair and efficient FL systems. In this paper, a DRL-based joint secure aggregation and resource orchestration scheme is proposed to guarantee security and fairness, and improve efficiency for hierarchical FL assisted by untrusted mobile-edge computing (MEC) servers. We formulate a joint optimization problem of data size, payment and resource orchestration, to maximize the long-term social welfare subject to secure aggregation and limited resources. Since the formulated problem is a complex mixed integer dynamic optimization problem with NP-hardness, where multiple mixed integer optimization variables are highly coupled in time-varying constraints and objective function, it is difficult to obtain its optimal solution via traditional optimization methods. Thus, we propose a hierarchical reward function-based DRL algorithm (MATD3) to guide the agents to approach the optimal policy of secure aggregation and resource orchestration. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm MATD3 can achieve superior performance over comparison algorithms and the MEC-enabled HFL framework outperforms two-layer FL frameworks.

Youth Welfare Subject ‘Havruta Teaching Method’ Application and Improvement Plan

Youth Welfare Subject ‘Havruta Teaching Method’ Application and Improvement Plan

Energy Efficiency and Directed Technical Change: Implications for Climate Change Mitigation

Abstract I develop a directed technical change model of economic growth and energy efficiency in order to study the impact of climate change mitigation policies on energy use. I show that the standard Cobb–Douglas production function used in the environmental macroeconomics literature overstates the reduction in cumulative energy use that can be achieved with a given path of energy taxes. I also show that, in the model, the government combines energy taxes with research and development (R&D) policy that favors output-increasing technology—rather than energy efficiency technology—to maximize welfare subject to a constraint on cumulative energy use. In addition, I study energy use dynamics following sudden improvements in energy efficiency. Exogenous shocks that increase energy efficiency also decrease the incentive for subsequent energy efficiency R&D and increase long-run energy use relative to a world without the original shock. Subsidies for energy efficiency R&D, however, permanently alter R&D incentives and decrease long-run energy use.

On Net Energy Metering X: Optimal Prosumer Decisions, Social Welfare, and Cross-Subsidies

We introduce NEM X, an inclusive retail tariff model that captures features of existing net energy metering (NEM) policies. It is shown that the optimal prosumer decision under NEM X obeys by a two-threshold policy. The threshold policy yields three household consumption modes: (a) the net-consuming mode where the prosumer consumes more than its behind-the-meter distributed energy resource (DER) production when the DER production is below a predetermined lower threshold, (b) the net-producing mode where the prosumer consumes less than its DER production when the DER production is above a predetermined upper threshold, and (c) the net-zero energy mode where the prosumer’s consumption matches its DER generation when its DER production is between the lower and upper thresholds. Both the thresholds are obtained in closed-form and computed apriori. Next, we analyze the regulator’s rate-setting process that determines NEM X parameters such as retail/sell rates, fixed charges, and price differentials in time-of-use tariffs’ on and off-peak periods. A stochastic Ramsey pricing program that maximizes social welfare subject to the revenue break-even constraint for the regulated utility is formulated. Performance of several NEM X policies is evaluated using real and synthetic data to illuminate impacts of NEM policy designs on social welfare, cross-subsidies of prosumers by consumers, and payback time of DER investments that affect long-run DER adoptions.

Generalized binary utility functions and fair allocations

The problem of finding envy-free allocations of indivisible goods cannot always be solved; therefore, it is common to study some relaxations such as envy-free up to one good (EF1) and envy-free up to any positively valued good (EFX). Another property of interest for the efficiency of an allocation is the Pareto Optimality (PO). Under additive utility functions for goods, it is possible to find EF1 and PO allocations using the Nash social welfare. However, finding an allocation that maximizes the Nash social welfare is a computationally costly problem. Maximizing the utilitarian social welfare subject to EF1 constraints is an NP-complete problem for the case where three or more agents participate. In this work, we propose a restricted case of additive utility functions called generalized binary utility functions. The proposed utilities are a generalization of binary and identical utilities simultaneously. In this scenario, we present a polynomial-time algorithm that maximizes the utilitarian social welfare and, at the same time, produces an EF1 and PO allocation for goods as well as for chores. Moreover, a slight modification of our algorithm gives a better allocation: one which is EFX.

Consciousness and welfare subjectivity

AbstractMany philosophers tacitly accept the View: consciousness is necessary for being a welfare subject. That is, in order to be an eligible bearer of welfare goods and bads, an entity must be capable of phenomenal consciousness. However, this paper argues that, in the absence of a compelling rationale, we are not licensed to accept the View, because doing so amounts to fallacious reasoning in theorizing about welfare: insisting on the View when consciousness is not in fact important for welfare value in a systematic and significant way is objectionably “consciousist.” As a result, the View does not advance our understanding of the value of consciousness. The paper further diagnoses why we may be attracted to the View, and what we should accept instead.

Facebook enforcement “saga”: How to enforce competition, consumer, and data protection laws in the digital economy

The digital economy has brought new challenges to the enforcement of consumer, competition, and data protection laws as certain market practices (in particular, data practices) can simultaneously infringe all these three areas of law. However, the interdependence between consumer, competition, and data protection laws in the digital economy has so far been rarely reflected in their enforcement by national agencies. As evidenced by the Facebook enforcement “saga”, uncoordinated enforcement efforts by competition, consumer, and data protection agencies, which act in silos and focus only on national perspective, pose a threat to the effective protection of consumer welfare and data subject (consumer) rights in the EU. Therefore, it is proposed to introduce cooperation mechanisms between different agencies, both at the EU and national level, in cases involving practices that may potentially infringe all three areas of law and present a risk to sustainable development of the digital economy. It is argued that only a coordinated, cross-institutional, and multi-disciplinary enforcement can provide an effective response to such practices applied by digital giants, such as Facebook, Google, Amazon or Apple, and ensure that consumer welfare and data subject (consumer) rights are not compromised.

Mitigating traffic congestion induced by transportation network companies: A policy analysis

This paper analyzes and evaluates several policies aiming to mitigate the congestion effect a Transportation Network Company (TNC) brings to bear on an idealized city that contains a dense central core surrounded by a larger periphery. The TNC offers both solo and pooling e-hail services to the users of public transport. We develop a spatial market equilibrium model over two building blocks: an aggregate congestion model that describes the traffic impact of TNC operations on all travelers in the city, including private motorists, and a matching model that estimates the TNC’s level of service based on the interactions between riders and TNC drivers. Based on the equilibrium model, we formulate and solve the optimal pricing problem, in which the TNC seeks to optimize its profit or social welfare subject to regulatory costs and/or constraints. Three congestion mitigation policies are implemented in this study: (i) a trip-based policy that charges a congestion fee on each solo trip starting or ending in the city center; (ii) a cordon-based policy that charges TNC vehicles entering the city center with zero or one passenger; and (iii) a cruising cap policy that requires the TNC to maintain the fleet utilization ratio in the city center above a threshold. Based on a case study of Chicago, we find TNC operations may have a significant congestion effect. Failing to anticipate this effect in the pricing problem leads to sub-optimal decisions that worsen traffic congestion and hurt the TNC’s profitability. Of the three policies, the trip-based policy delivers the best performance. It reduces traffic congestion modestly, keeps the TNC’s level of service almost intact, and improves overall social welfare substantially. The cruising cap policy benefits private motorists, thanks to the extra congestion relief it brings about. However, because other stakeholders together suffer a much greater loss, its net impact on social welfare is negative. Paradoxically, the policy could worsen the very traffic conditions in the city center that it is designed to improve.

Subjective Theories of Ill-Being

According to subjectivism about ill-being, the token states of affairs that are basically bad for you must be suitably connected, under the proper conditions, to your negative attitudes. This article explores the prospects for this family of theories and addresses some of its challenges. This article (i) shows that subjectivism about ill-being can be derived from a more general doctrine that requires a negatively valenced relationship between any welfare subject and the token states that are of basic harm to that subject and (ii) responds to some objections, including the objection that subjectivists about ill-being cannot plausibly explain the badness of pain.

Average Utilitarianism Implies Solipsistic Egoism

ABSTRACT Average utilitarianism and several related axiologies, when paired with the standard expectational theory of decision-making under risk and with reasonable empirical credences, can find their practical prescriptions overwhelmingly determined by the minuscule probability that the agent assigns to solipsism—that is, to the hypothesis that there is only one welfare subject in the world, namely, herself. This either (i) constitutes a reductio of these axiologies, (ii) suggests that they require bespoke decision theories, or (iii) furnishes an unexpected argument for ethical egoism.

Mitigating traffic congestion induced by Transportation Network Companies: a policy analysis

This paper analyzes and evaluates several policies aiming to mitigate the congestion effect a Transportation Network Company (TNC) brings to bear on an idealized city that contains a dense central core surrounded by a larger periphery. The TNC offers both solo and pooling e-hail services to the users of public transport. We develop a spatial market equilibrium model over two building blocks: an aggregate congestion model describing the traffic impact of TNC operations on all travelers in the city, including private motorists, and a matching model estimating the TNC's level of service based on the interactions between riders and TNC drivers. Based on the equilibrium model, we formulate and propose solution algorithms to the optimal pricing problem, in which the TNC seeks to optimize its profit or social welfare subject to the extra costs and/or constraints imposed by the congestion mitigation policies. Three congestion mitigation policies are implemented in this study: (i) a trip-based policy that charges a congestion fee on each solo trip starting or ending in the city center; (ii) a cordon-based policy that charges TNC vehicles entering the city center with zero or one passenger; and (iii) a cruising cap policy that requires the TNC to maintain the fleet utilization ratio in the city center above a threshold. Based on a case study of Chicago, we find TNC operations may have a significant congestion effect. Failing to anticipate this effect in the pricing problem leads to sub-optimal decisions that worsen traffic congestion and hurt the TNC's profitability. Of the three policies, the trip-based policy delivers the best performance. It reduces traffic congestion modestly, keeps the TNC's level of service almost intact, and improves overall social welfare substantially. The cruising cap policy benefits private motorists, thanks to the extra congestion relief it brings about. However, because other stakeholders together suffer a much greater loss, its net impact on social welfare is negative. Paradoxically, the policy could worsen the very traffic conditions in the city center that it is designed to improve.

District-Fair Participatory Budgeting

Participatory budgeting is a method used by city governments to select public projects to fund based on residents' votes. Many cities use participatory budgeting at a district level. Typically, a budget is divided among districts proportionally to their population, and each district holds an election over local projects and then uses its budget to fund the projects most preferred by its voters. However, district-level participatory budgeting can yield poor social welfare because it does not necessarily fund projects supported across multiple districts. On the other hand, decision making that only takes global social welfare into account can be unfair to districts: A social-welfare-maximizing solution might not fund any of the projects preferred by a district, despite the fact that its constituents pay taxes to the city. Thus, we study how to fairly maximize social welfare in a participatory budgeting setting with a single city-wide election. We propose a notion of fairness that guarantees each district at least as much welfare as it would have received in a district-level election. We show that, although optimizing social welfare subject to this notion of fairness is NP-hard, we can efficiently construct a lottery over welfare-optimal outcomes that is fair in expectation. Moreover, we show that, when we are allowed to slightly relax fairness, we can efficiently compute a fair solution that is welfare-maximizing, but which may overspend the budget.

Sheep and goat welfare in Croatia: Assessing veterinary student attitudes

Research into the veterinary perception of animal welfare is becoming ever more relevant. Following previous studies on Croatian veterinary students? attitudes and opinions towards farm animal and pet welfare, the present study assessed their attitudes towards sheep and goat welfare, focusing on the year of veterinary medicine study and area of student residence. The questionnaire survey involved students of all six years of the integrated undergraduate and graduate study programme at the Faculty of Veterinary Medicine, University of Zagreb, Zagreb, Croatia. First-year students filled out the questionnaire twice, before and after having attended the animal welfare subject. The questionnaire consisted of two sections. The first section included questions on student demographic and experiential characteristics, whereas the second section asked them to define the level of cognition, sentience and welfare compromise in sheep and goats through five-point Likert scale questions. Study results revealed that students agreed that sheep and goats have cognitive abilities and feelings, but they neither agreed nor disagreed about their welfare compromise. There was no significant difference in student responses according to years of study or between first-year student responses before and after having attended the animal welfare subject or according to areas of student residence. These results could suggest poor student interaction with small ruminants and, therefore, help expand the respective curriculum.

Outsiders, insiders and interventions in the housing market

In the wake of China’s “great migration,” many cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, restrict some residents from owning housing, forcing them to rent. We build a model studying motivations for and effects of ownership-restricting policies. When some agents are prohibited from purchasing housing, competitive equilibrium further punishes renters, failing to attain a “second-best” that maximizes welfare subject to the policy’s intended constraint. We then consider real estate taxation, a hotly debated topic in China, currently undergoing reform. We show that positive taxes on housing transactions can help mitigate the inefficiency caused by restricted ownership, but only by introducing a new distortion. Meanwhile, subsidizing rental transactions could, in theory, restore the second-best, but only by diverting public funds away from other uses.

Outsiders, Insiders and Interventions in the Housing Market

In the wake of China's great migration, many cities, including Beijing and Shanghai, restrict some residents from owning housing, forcing them to rent. We build a model studying motivations for and effects of ownership-restricting policies. When some agents are prohibited from purchasing housing, competitive equilibrium further punishes renters, failing to attain a second-best that maximizes welfare subject to the policy's intended constraint. We then consider real estate taxation, a hotly debated topic in China, currently undergoing reform. We show that positive taxes on housing transactions can help mitigate the inefficiency caused by restricted ownership, but only by introducing a new distortion. Meanwhile, subsidizing rental transactions could, in theory, restore the second-best, but only by diverting public funds away from other uses.

Editorial

Editorial

Activating the Welfare Subject: The Problem of Agency

While accepting Banton’s recently expressed view that sociology and social policy are distinct disciplines, this article argues that times of radical change can profitably bring the two into closer dialogue. Considering an argument from Emirbayer and Mische that agency becomes especially apparent in unsettled times, it focuses on conceptions of agency at play in the design and implementation of recent UK welfare reforms, and in subsequent legal challenges. Identifying a series of key measures in the Welfare Reform Act of 2012 and the Welfare and Work Act of 2016, this article examines the challenges that have ensued, and the way that agency is revealed as both a site of disciplinary control and as a focus for contestation, pitting the purposive rationality of welfare reform against the practical reason that emerges from claimant experience.

On the Dynamics of Distributed Energy Adoption: Equilibrium, Stability, and Limiting Capacity

The death spiral hypothesis in electric utility represents a positive feedback phenomenon in which a regulated utility is driven to financial instability by rising prices and declining demand. We establish conditions for the existence of death spiral and conditions of stable adoption of distributed energy resources. We show in particular that linear tariffs always induce death spiral when the fixed operating cost of the utility rises beyond a certain threshold. For two-part tariffs with connection and volumetric charges, the Ramsey pricing that optimizes myopically social welfare subject to the revenue adequacy constraint induces a stable equilibrium. The Ramsey pricing, however, inhibits renewable adoption with a high connection charge. In contrast, a two-part tariff with a small connection charge results in a stable adoption process with a higher level of renewable adoption and greater long-term total consumer surplus. Market data are used to illustrate various solar adoption scenarios.

Optimal Saving and Work Hours in the Heterogeneous Agent Neoclassical Growth Model

This paper introduces work - leisure choice into a constrained optimal policy problem in a neoclassical growth model with idiosyncratic risk and incomplete markets. The constrained planner cannot complete markets, but must improve welfare subject to agents’ budget constraints. As such, rather than addressing the market failure of incomplete markets, the planner addresses the pecuniary externalities of each agents’ saving and work decision on interest and wage rates. In an economy calibrated to U.S. wealth and income inequality, the paper finds the constrained planner increases aggregate capital and reduces aggregate hours worked. The resulting increase in wages and fall in interest rates shifts the distribution of consumption towards the consumption poor, since they rely more on labor income than capital income. However, in a constrained efficient allocation, only highly productive individuals increase saving, while less productive individuals reduce saving. Moreover, only the asset poor and less productive agents reduce work hours; the wealthy and highly productive increase work hours due to wealth effects. While total work hours fall, the increase in work hours by the most productive is sufficient to increase effective labor supply.