Empirical welfare economics

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Chambers, Christopher P.; Echenique, Federico
• 署名单位: Georgetown University; University of California System; University of California Berkeley
• 刊物名称: THEORETICAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 1933-6837
• DOI: 10.3982/TE5845
• 发表日期: 2025-07-01
• 页码: 911-939
• 关键词: Revealed preference theory; Afriat's theorem

摘要

Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents' past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the existence of utilities that render a given allocation Pareto optimal. We show that a candidate allocation is efficient for some utilities consistent with the choice data if and only if it is efficient for an incomplete relation derived from the revealed preference relations and convexity. Similar ideas are used to make counterfactual choices for a single consumer, policy comparisons by the Kaldor criterion, and offer bounds on the degree of inefficiency in a Pareto suboptimal allocation.