Preferences in policy optimization and optimal economic policy

Erasmus, 2009

Abstract-Positional good shares with public good the non-private characteristic of consumption: for a positional good, given the consumption choice of one party, the other (s) must consume a corresponding negative amount of what the first party chooses to consume. Therefore, we treat positional good in a diagrammatic illustration similar to the Samuelsonian criteria for the public good. The aim of this work is to introduce the implications for this in terms of Pareto efficiency.

International Review of Economics

2008

Sen's "chooser dependence" of preferences generates issues of indexicality which, we claim, can in fact be reduced to a specification of the content of preferences within a standard approach, by means of Lewis' theory of attitudes de se. While context sensitivity of preferences can be dealt with by the addition to the outcomes of choice of their relevant mereological contexts, indexical sensitivity requires the content of preferences to include (the nature of) the decision maker him/herself. The result is a naturalistic internalization of preferences, which become object of preference, belief, and action.

2018

OF THE DISSERTATION Three Essays in the Theory of Preferences by SEYED HASSAN NOSRATABADI Dissertation Director: Oriol Carbonell-Nicolau This dissertation consists of three chapters. The first chapter addresses the classical questions of utility representation and maximization. It relaxes the notion of weak upper continuity (Campbell and Walker (1990)) to obtain a property called partial weak upper continuity and shows that both maximization of preferences and representation by a utility function can be achieved under this new property. The rest of this dissertation focuses on extending revealed preference theory to accommodate behavioral anomalies observed in the experimental data. In particular, I offer a framework to expand the theory of revealed preferences to the case where a DM’s choice is not completely identified with a single preferences. In Chapter 2, I use a divide and conquer procedure in order to expand the revealed preference theory to accommodate behavioral anomalies ...

The European Journal of the History of Economic Thought, 2019

This book is a Festschrift to honour Alessandro Roncaglia, Professor of Economics at Sapienza University of Rome, for his outstanding work on classical political economy. Few graduates today would seek out a career as a classical economist, but Roncaglia has challenged the status quo in the profession. The editors argue that Roncaglia stands out as one of the "most important representatives" (p. ix) of classical economics, systematically focussing on the need for sound economic theory illuminated by economic history, geared to serving economic policy. The sixteen chapters making up the volume pay a timely tribute to Roncaglia's intellectual trajectory, exploring the wide range of topics represented in his more than two-hundred published works (pp. 243-252).

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), 2015

A Brief History of Economic Thought

The evolution of economic thought can be traced back from its beginnings in classical antiquity up to the present day. In this book, Professor Alessandro Roncaglia offers a clear, concise and updated version of his award-winning The Wealth of Ideas, studying the development of economic thought through perspectives and debates on the economy and society over time. With chapters on prominent economic theorists, including William Petty, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes, as well as on other important figures and key debates of each period, Roncaglia critically evaluates the foundations of the marginalist-neoclassical (scarcity-utility) approach in comparison to the Classical-Keynes approach. A comprehensive guide to the history of economic thought, this book will be of value not only to undergraduate and postgraduate students studying economic thought but also to any readers desiring to study how economics has evolved up to the present day. alessandro roncaglia is Professor of Economics at Sapienza University of Rome. He is a member of the Accademia Nazionale dei Lincei, Editor of PSL Quarterly Review and Moneta e Credito, and was previously President of the Società Italiana degli Economisti. His numerous publications, translated into various languages, include The Wealth of Ideas, also published by Cambridge University Press (2005).

International Review of Applied Economics