Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory - Softcover

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Allan M. Feldman has taught economics at Brown University for 34 years. He has written and published articles in the areas of general equilibrium theory, fairness and equity, Arrow’s theorem, strategy-proofness, majority voting theory, compensation criteria, the value of life, and law and economics. He has taught thousands of Brown undergraduates in a wide variety of courses, and has served for many years as the director of undergraduate studies in economics at Brown. He has also worked as an economics consultant in litigation.

Roberto Serrano is a Professor of Economics at Brown University, where he has worked since 1992 when he got his PhD from Harvard University. His fields of research are economic theory and game theory. He has been an Associate Editor of several journals, including Economic Theory, Mathematical Social Sciences and Research in Economics. He has published over thirty articles in refereed journals, and his research has been supported through fellowships and awards from prestigious institutions, including The Sloan Foundation, the U.S.-Israel Binational Science Foundation, the U.S. National Science Foundation and Spain’s Fundacion Banco Herrero.

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Welfare economics, and social choice theory, are disciplines that blend economics, ethics, political science, and mathematics.

Topics in Welfare Economics and Social Choice Theory, 2^nd Edition, include models of economic exchange and production, uncertainty, optimality, public goods, social improvement criteria, life and death choices, majority voting, Arrows theorem, and theories of implementation and mechanism design.

Our goal is to make value judgments about economic and political mechanisms:  For instance, does the competitive market produce distributions of products and services that are good or bad for society?   Does majority voting produce good or bad outcomes?  How can we design tax mechanisms that result in efficient amounts of public goods being produced?

We have attempted, in this book, to minimize mathematical obstacles, and to make this field accessible to undergraduate and graduate students and the interested non-expert.