Tootfinder

A look at Amsterdam's failed experiment to create a fair welfare AI system that would evaluate every welfare applicant in the city for potential fraud (MIT Technology Review)
https://www.technologyreview.com/2025/06/1

Inside Amsterdam’s high-stakes experiment to create fair welfare AI
The Dutch city thought it could break a decade-long trend of implementing discriminatory algorithms. Its failure raises the question: can these programs ever be fair?

Trump administration sues California over egg prices and blames animal welfare laws (Steve Karnowski/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/egg-prices-california-animal-welfare-trump-48296b0149580e5620d6bcdcdcce89d7
http://www.memeorandum.com/250711/p95#a250711p95

Protecting our furry friends: EU sets first ever minimum standards for dog and cat welfare - Talking Europe
https://www.france24.com/en/tv-shows/talking-europe/20250711-protecting-our-furry-friends-eu-sets-first-ever-minimum-standards-for-dog-and-cat-welfare

Urge Chanel to Stop Using Ostrich Feathers in Their Designs https://www.speciesunite.com/urge-chanel-to-stop-using-ostrich-feathers-in-their-designs?utm_source=Mastodon

Urge Chanel to Stop Using Ostrich Feathers in Their Designs | Advocate for Ethical Fashion — Species Unite
Join us in urging Chanel to end the use of ostrich feathers, supporting compassionate, cruelty-free fashion alternatives. Act now for animal welfare.

Probing the Preferences of a Language Model: Integrating Verbal and Behavioral Tests of AI Welfare
Valen Tagliabue, Leonard Dung
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07961 https://…

Probing the Preferences of a Language Model: Integrating Verbal and Behavioral Tests of AI Welfare
We develop new experimental paradigms for measuring welfare in language models. We compare verbal reports of models about their preferences with preferences expressed through behavior when navigating a virtual environment and selecting conversation topics. We also test how costs and rewards affect behavior and whether responses to an eudaimonic welfare scale - measuring states such as autonomy and purpose in life - are consistent across semantically equivalent prompts. Overall, we observed a no…

Towards Continuous Home Cage Monitoring: An Evaluation of Tracking and Identification Strategies for Laboratory Mice
Juan Pablo Oberhauser, Daniel Grzenda
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.07929

Towards Continuous Home Cage Monitoring: An Evaluation of Tracking and Identification Strategies for Laboratory Mice
Continuous, automated monitoring of laboratory mice enables more accurate data collection and improves animal welfare through real-time insights. Researchers can achieve a more dynamic and clinically relevant characterization of disease progression and therapeutic effects by integrating behavioral and physiological monitoring in the home cage. However, providing individual mouse metrics is difficult because of their housing density, similar appearances, high mobility, and frequent interactions.…

Social Welfare in Battery Charging Games
Simon Krogmann, Pascal Lenzner, Alexander Skopalik, Tobias Str\"aubig
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06320 https://

Social Welfare in Battery Charging Games
The recent rise of renewable energy produced by many decentralized sources yields interesting market design challenges for electrical grids. Balancing supply and demand in such networks is both a temporal and spatial challenge due to capacity constraints. The recent surge in the number of household-owned batteries, especially in regions with rooftop solar adoption, offers mitigation potential but often acts misaligned with grid-level objectives. In fact, the decision to charge or discharge a ho…

Secure and Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Energy Transactions using Blockchain Technology
Antar Kumar Biswas, Masoud H. Nazari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.06728 https://

Secure and Decentralized Peer-to-Peer Energy Transactions using Blockchain Technology
This paper presents an optimal peer-to-peer (P2P) energy transaction mechanism leveraging decentralized blockchain technology to enable a secure and scalable retail electricity market for the increasing penetration of distributed energy resources (DERs). A decentralized bidding strategy is proposed to maximize individual profits while collectively enhancing social welfare. The market design and transaction processes are simulated using the Ethereum testnet, demonstrating the blockchain network'…

Maximizing Social Welfare with Side Payments
Ivan Geffner, Caspar Oesterheld, Vincent Conitzer
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.07147 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.…

Maximizing Social Welfare with Side Payments
We examine normal-form games in which players may \emph{pre-commit} to outcome-contingent transfers before choosing their actions. In the one-shot version of this model, Jackson and Wilkie showed that side contracting can backfire: even a game with a Pareto-optimal Nash equilibrium can devolve into inefficient equilibria once unbounded, simultaneous commitments are allowed. The root cause is a prisoner's dilemma effect, where each player can exploit her commitment power to reshape the equilibri…

Anonymous voting in a heterogeneous society
Yaron Azrieli, Ritesh Jain, Semin Kim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08055 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.08055

Anonymous voting in a heterogeneous society
We study the design of voting mechanisms in a binary social choice environment where agents' cardinal valuations are independent but not necessarily identically distributed. The mechanism must be anonymous -- the outcome is invariant to permutations of the reported values. We show that if there are two agents then expected welfare is always maximized by an ordinal majority rule, but with three or more agents there are environments in which cardinal mechanisms that take into account preference i…

Utilitarian or Quantile-Welfare Evaluation of Health Policy?
Charles F. Manski, John Mullahy
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05529 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05…

Utilitarian or Quantile-Welfare Evaluation of Health Policy?
This paper considers quantile-welfare evaluation of health policy as an alternative to utilitarian evaluation. Manski (1988) originally proposed and studied maximization of quantile utility as a model of individual decision making under uncertainty, juxtaposing it with maximization of expected utility. That paper's primary motivation was to exploit the fact that maximization of quantile utility requires only an ordinal formalization of utility, not a cardinal one. This paper transfers these ide…

Wales' 'forgotten' architect of the welfare state, Jim Griffith's.
https://nation.cymru/news/event-to-commemorate-wales-forgotten-architect-of-the-welfare-state/

Event to commemorate Wales' 'forgotten' architect of the welfare state
Martin Shipton Fifty years after the death of Llanelli MP Jim Griffiths – a man described as “one of the greatest sons of Wales” – a special memorial event will be held in the town. The politician, who has been hailed as the founding father of the welfare state, became the first Secretary of State […]

MLB has removed the #reverseboycott Oakland Athletics game from its streaming archive as an effort to hide it. This fact hit the news, so now people are remembering it again—or learning about it anew.

Let’s All Talk About The ‘Reverse Boycott’ Oakland A’s Game That MLB Is Trying To Memory-Hole
I’ve been an MLB.TV evangelist for some time now. My deep love for the game of baseball has led me to subscribe to baseball’s streaming service, still probably the best in sports, for o…

Beyond ATE: Multi-Criteria Design for A/B Testing
Jiachun Li, Kaining Shi, David Simchi-Levi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.05864 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.05…

Beyond ATE: Multi-Criteria Design for A/B Testing
A/B testing is a widely adopted methodology for estimating conditional average treatment effects (CATEs) in both clinical trials and online platforms. While most existing research has focused primarily on maximizing estimation accuracy, practical applications must also account for additional objectives-most notably welfare or revenue loss. In many settings, it is critical to administer treatments that improve patient outcomes or to implement plans that generate greater revenue from customers. W…

The Center Left Is in Denial About NATO’s New Normal https://jacobin.com/2025/08/center-left-nato-military-welfare/

The Center Left Is in Denial About NATO’s New Normal
NATO members across Europe have embraced Donald Trump’s call to spend 5 percent of GDP on defense. Many social democrats argue that this shouldn’t come at the cost of welfare cuts, but they refuse to challenge the military spending plan itself.

From Digital Distrust to Codified Honesty: Experimental Evidence on Generative AI in Credence Goods Markets
Alexander Erlei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.06069 https://

From Digital Distrust to Codified Honesty: Experimental Evidence on Generative AI in Credence Goods Markets
Generative AI is transforming the provision of expert services. This article uses a series of one-shot experiments to quantify the behavioral, welfare and distribution consequences of large language models (LLMs) on AI-AI, Human-Human, Human-AI and Human-AI-Human expert markets. Using a credence goods framework where experts have private information about the optimal service for consumers, we find that Human-Human markets generally achieve higher levels of efficiency than AI-AI and Human-AI mar…

As it happens she was upset before PMQs started, it's reported as being something personal, pointless speculation isn't very useful.
https://mastodonapp.uk/@bbcnewsfeed/114784881998604378

Think 🇪🇺 only regulates bottle caps, and 🍌 curvature?
Enode has a good post on an important and exciting development that adds value to devices. The freedom for consumers to control their connected devices through a service of their choice creates valuable opportunities to enhance European welfare.

The EU Data Act: What the energy industry needs to know before September 12 | Enode
On September 12, 2025, the EU Data Act becomes fully applicable across the EU. For the energy industry, this marks a turning point in how data flows across devices, services, and users. It puts into law what has already been building for years: the principle that people should be able to access and share their own energy data. This post is the first in our EU Data Act series, breaking down what the regulation means and why it matters.

Human cost of Tory and Labour welfare cuts.
UK is no longer a Welfare State: it's becoming a Warfare State wiith reckless militarisation, and a war without bullets on the "surplus population".
'I've got no money. I'm constantly cold. I don't want to be here anymore' - Manchester Evening News

'I've got no money. I'm constantly cold. I don't want to be here anymore'
The Manchester Evening News spent a day at Citizen's Advice to find out what impact Labour's controversial welfare cuts could have

An efficiency ordering of k-price auctions under complete information
Sumit Goel, Jeffrey Zeidel
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.05738 https://

An efficiency ordering of k-price auctions under complete information
We study $k$-price auctions in a complete information environment and characterize all pure-strategy Nash equilibrium outcomes. In a setting with $n$ agents having ordered valuations, we show that any agent, except those with the lowest $k-2$ valuations, can win in equilibrium. As a consequence, worst-case welfare increases monotonically as we go from $k=2$ (second-price auction) to $k=n$ (lowest-price auction), with the first-price auction achieving the highest worst-case welfare.

'[T]the standard it proposes has no fixed boundaries. No definition of danger. No threshold for entry. No requirement that the belief be verified, or even verifiable. If the court adopts it, ICE will will be one of the many law enforcement agencies not needing a warrant. It will only need a justification. A welfare call. A safety tip. A closed door. A silence misread or claimed as threat.'
The Supreme Court might turbocharge ICE more than Trump’s big bill.
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/07/supreme-court-ice-trump-big-bill-deportations.html

Detecting and measuring respiratory events in horses during exercise with a microphone: deep learning vs. standard signal processing
Jeanne I. M. Parmentier (Utrecht University, University of Twente, Inertia Technology B.V), Rhana M. Aarts (Utrecht University), Elin Hernlund (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), Marie Rhodin (Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences), Berend Jan van der Zwaag (University of Twente, Inertia Technology B.V)

Detecting and measuring respiratory events in horses during exercise with a microphone: deep learning vs. standard signal processing
Monitoring respiration parameters such as respiratory rate could be beneficial to understand the impact of training on equine health and performance and ultimately improve equine welfare. In this work, we compare deep learning-based methods to an adapted signal processing method to automatically detect cyclic respiratory events and extract the dynamic respiratory rate from microphone recordings during high intensity exercise in Standardbred trotters. Our deep learning models are able to detect …

Good for you Andy Burnham.
"At the weekend the continuity rebels won the backing of Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester. Burnham, who has become increasingly vocal in recent weeks in setting out an alternative, more muscular, soft left alternative to what Keir Starmer is offering, ... he urged Labour MPs to vote down the bill."

In this book, Theoharis introduces us to the people leading the movement to end poverty, including:
multiracial groups of homeless people rising up from the streets and seizing empty, federally-owned homes;
mothers on welfare shutting down entire city blocks and going toe-to-toe with some of the most powerful people in the country;
farmworkers busting modern-day slave rings and winning living wages from multinational fast-food companies; and
coal miners, veterans,…

Welfare check? Bloody hell!
#NSWpolice

Body-worn camera footage shown in court after woman accuses NSW Police of assault, battery
Body-worn camera footage has shown the moment a woman was pepper sprayed and her dog tasered during a mental health welfare check by NSW Police.

Captive lion population triples in Thailand, fueled by tourist selfies and pet trade https://www.speciesunite.com/news-stories/captive-lion-population-triples-in-thailand-fueled-by-tourist-selfies-and…

Captive lion population triples in Thailand, fueled by tourist selfies and pet trade — Species Unite
Researchers warn that unchecked breeding, social media hype, and a booming exotic pet trade are creating a welfare crisis in Thailand’s captive lion industry.

"Cigarettes, booze and petrol bankroll Europe's welfare empire.
But what if people give up their sinful ways?"
Interesting take from The Economist.

Dark Areas ⬛️
黑黢黢的角落 ⬛️
📷 Nikon FE
🎞️Ilford FP4 Plus, expired 1994
buy me ☕️ ?/请我喝杯☕️？
#filmphotography

Quantifying the Social Costs of Power Outages and Restoration Disparities Across Four U.S. Hurricanes
Xiangpeng Li, Junwei Ma, Bo Li, Ali Mostafavi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02653

Quantifying the Social Costs of Power Outages and Restoration Disparities Across Four U.S. Hurricanes
The multifaceted nature of disaster impact shows that densely populated areas contribute more to aggregate burden, while sparsely populated but heavily affected regions suffer disproportionately at the individual level. This study introduces a framework for quantifying the societal impacts of power outages by translating customer weighted outage exposure into deprivation measures, integrating welfare metrics with three recovery indicators, average outage days per customer, restoration duration,…

To go back to my previous post, for a plant-based diet to be attractive, we need to help people choose plant based alternatives to meat for more or less all occasions. So meat is no longer the default
That's what we need good chefs for: to help turn traditional foods into vegetarian/vegan alternatives that are tasty and easy to prepare.
Most traditional dishes are surprisingly modern. Our tastes can easily be changed...
As an example, in France, the markets are laden with charcuterie and cheese, BUT ALSO, beautiful fresh fruits and vegetables - a nudge towards the latter would improve human health, animal welfare and reduce emissions...
#PlantBased food.
This site however is outstanding making french cuisine vegan
https://menu-vegetarien.com/

That’s an excellent move.
Let’s make it national.
Decades ago, my first wife was a librarian and met a lot of people. She was a friendly person. She befriended a guy who seemed to misunderstand friendship. We ended up having to refuse entry to CPS twice in the ensuing 3 weeks. Thankfully, they didn’t deem either anonymous report worth seeking a warrant.

It’s almost as if RTOs and grind-for-welfare are scams. 🤔 https://aus.social/@rakkar/114888408069212569

TUC-PPO: Team Utility-Constrained Proximal Policy Optimization for Spatial Public Goods Games
Zhaoqilin Yang, Xin Wang, Ruichen Zhang, Chanchan Li, Youliang Tian
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.02675

TUC-PPO: Team Utility-Constrained Proximal Policy Optimization for Spatial Public Goods Games
We introduce Team Utility-Constrained Proximal Policy Optimization (TUC-PPO), a new deep reinforcement learning framework. It extends Proximal Policy Optimization (PPO) by integrating team welfare objectives specifically for spatial public goods games. Unlike conventional approaches where cooperation emerges indirectly from individual rewards, TUC-PPO instead optimizes a bi-level objective integrating policy gradients and team utility constraints. Consequently, all policy updates explicitly inc…

The Welfare Effects of Policy Signalling in a Regime Change Game
Georgy Lukyanov
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.04750 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.04750

The Welfare Effects of Policy Signalling in a Regime Change Game
We explore a specific parametric example of a regime change game in which a policymaker defends the status quo against a continuum of atomistic agents who seek to overthrow it. At the start of the game, the policymaker can initiate a policy intervention to make an attack less appealing. When agents' private information is relatively imprecise, signalling is beneficial to the policymaker when the fundamentals are strong but detrimental when the fundamentals are weak.

Get the Labour Party to reinstate the only 4 MPs brave enough to oppose their unfair and unwise welfare cuts. #stoppoverty #labourparty #keirstarmer

Reinstate the Four Suspended Labour MPs
The decision to suspend the whip from four MPs for opposing cuts to welfare payments for disabled people is wrong. Sign the petition to demand their reinstatement and a better future for Labour:

Federal Reserve Communication and the COVID-19 Pandemic
Jonathan Benchimol, Sophia Kazinnik, Yossi Saadon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04830 https://arxiv.or…

Federal Reserve Communication and the COVID-19 Pandemic
In this study, we examine the Federal Reserve's communication strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic, comparing them with communication during previous periods of economic stress. Using specialized dictionaries tailored to COVID-19, unconventional monetary policy (UMP), and financial stability, combined with sentiment analysis and topic modeling techniques, we identify a distinct focus in Fed communication during the pandemic on financial stability, market volatility, social welfare, and UMP, …

Medicaid 'gamers' are the new 'welfare queens' (Stephen Robinson/Public Notice)
https://www.publicnotice.co/p/republicans-medicaid-video-gamers-trump-bill
http://www.memeorandum.com/250723/p21#a250723p21

Consumer-based Carbon Costs: Integrating Consumer Carbon Preferences in Electricity Markets
Wenqian Jiang, Aditya Rangarajan, Line Roald
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01076 https:/…

Consumer-based Carbon Costs: Integrating Consumer Carbon Preferences in Electricity Markets
An increasing share of consumers care about the carbon footprint of their electricity. This paper proposes to integrate consumer carbon preferences in the electricity market-clearing through consumer-based carbon costs. Specifically, consumers can submit not only bids for power but also assign a cost to the carbon emissions incurred by their electricity use. We start from a centralized market clearing that maximizes social welfare under consideration of generation costs, consumer utility and co…

Reclaiming Constitutional Authority of Algorithmic Power
Yiyang Mei, Michael J Broyde
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11699 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.11699

Reclaiming Constitutional Authority of Algorithmic Power
Whether and how to govern AI is no longer a question of technical regulation. It is a question of constitutional authority. Across jurisdictions, algorithmic systems now perform functions once reserved to public institutions: allocating welfare, determining legal status, mediating access to housing, employment, and healthcare. These are not merely administrative operations. They are acts of rule. Yet the dominant models of AI governance fail to confront this reality. The European approach cente…

#Norway #China #Anarchism #Anarchy

Replaced article(s) found for cs.LG. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.LG/new
[7/8]:
Achieving Collective Welfare in Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning via Suggestion Sharing

It is so obvious. Why isn't a new, liberal Democratic Party being founded in the #USA?
Forget the #Democrats. They have shown themselves to be completely incapable in the current enormous crisis. They are afraid for their sinecures, act tactically and the welfare of the citizens is as little important …

Calls for criminal probe into New Jersey slaughterhouse after repeated welfare violations https://www.speciesunite.com/news-stories/calls-for-criminal-probe-into-new-jersey-slaughterhouse-after-…

Calls for criminal probe into New Jersey slaughterhouse after repeated welfare violations — Species Unite
Animal activists are calling on the Salem County Prosecutor to investigate a meat facility where a bull was left conscious for over six minutes during a botched slaughter.

The feds lost when it was sanctuary cities; this one could go the same way because #Constitution #TenthAmendment
Republicans ready assault on California animal welfare law - Roll Call
https://rollcall.com/2025/07/23/republicans-ready-assault-on-california-animal-welfare-law/

Anthropic enables Claude Opus 4 and 4.1 to end conversations in "cases of persistently harmful or abusive user interactions"; users can still start new chats (Anthropic)
https://www.anthropic.com/research/end-subset-conversations

Rachael Maskell, the Labour MP for York Central, who is one of the leading opponents of the bill, said: “They are going to have to go back to the negotiating table … deaf and disabled people’s organisations [DDPOs] are rejecting these changes as it fails to address future need and gives no security for people with fluctuating conditions, for instance where people are in remission.”
Starmer still facing Labour anger over fears of ‘two-tier’ welfare system

From Individual to Multi-Agent Algorithmic Recourse: Minimizing the Welfare Gap via Capacitated Bipartite Matching
Zahra Khotanlou, Kate Larson, Amir-Hossein Karimi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.11070

From Individual to Multi-Agent Algorithmic Recourse: Minimizing the Welfare Gap via Capacitated Bipartite Matching
Decision makers are increasingly relying on machine learning in sensitive situations. In such settings, algorithmic recourse aims to provide individuals with actionable and minimally costly steps to reverse unfavorable AI-driven decisions. While existing research predominantly focuses on single-individual (i.e., seeker) and single-model (i.e., provider) scenarios, real-world applications often involve multiple interacting stakeholders. Optimizing outcomes for seekers under an individual welfare…

Replaced article(s) found for q-fin.RM. https://arxiv.org/list/q-fin.RM/new
[1/1]:
- Optimal risk sharing, equilibria, and welfare with empirically realistic risk attitudes
Jean-Gabriel Lauzier, Liyuan Lin, Peter Wakker, Ruodu Wang

‘Historic’: How Mexico’s Welfare Policies Helped 13.4 Million People out of Poverty | Portside
https://portside.org/2025-08-20/historic-how-mexicos-welfare-policies-helped-134-million-people-out-poverty

With his authority damaged by poor judgment, absence of leadership and a sheer lack of understanding of what the Labour party exists for, Starmer will stumble on weakened and directionless, convincing himself that sitting next to Trump and attending Nato and G7 meetings means he has a historic role to play.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/jul/02/labour-government-welfare-bill-democracy-party-election-john-mcdonnell?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other

Benchmarking pig detection and tracking under diverse and challenging conditions
Jonathan Henrich, Christian Post, Maximilian Zilke, Parth Shiroya, Emma Chanut, Amir Mollazadeh Yamchi, Ramin Yahyapour, Thomas Kneib, Imke Traulsen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.16639

Benchmarking pig detection and tracking under diverse and challenging conditions
To ensure animal welfare and effective management in pig farming, monitoring individual behavior is a crucial prerequisite. While monitoring tasks have traditionally been carried out manually, advances in machine learning have made it possible to collect individualized information in an increasingly automated way. Central to these methods is the localization of animals across space (object detection) and time (multi-object tracking). Despite extensive research of these two tasks in pig farming,…

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.DS. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.DS/new
[1/1]:
- Welfare-Centric Clustering
Claire Jie Zhang, Seyed A. Esmaeili, Jamie Morgenstern

Screening with damages and ordeals
Filip Tokarski
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.04456 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.04456…

Screening with damages and ordeals
A welfare-maximizing designer allocates two kinds of goods using two wasteful screening instruments: ordeals, which enter agents' utilities additively, and damages, which harm agents in proportion to their values for the goods. If agents have common valuations for one of the goods, damages always lead to Pareto-dominated mechanisms: any allocation using damages can also be implemented with ordeals alone, while also leaving greater rents to inframarginal types. However, using damages can be opti…

Trade Policy and Structural Change
Hayato Kato, Kensuke Suzuki, Motoaki Takahashi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.01360 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.01360

Trade Policy and Structural Change
We examine how tariffs affect sectoral composition and welfare in an economy with nonhomothetic preferences and sectors being complements -- key drivers of structural change. Beyond their conventional role in trade protection, tariffs influence industrial structure by altering relative prices and income levels. We qualitatively characterize these mechanisms and use a quantitative dynamic model to show that a counterfactual 20-percentage-point increase in U.S. manufacturing tariffs since 2001 wo…

Tell New York to Stop Bailing Out the Cruel Horse Racing Industry #AnimalRights

Interdependent Bilateral Trade: Information vs Approximation
Shahar Dobzinski, Alon Eden, Kira Goldner, Ariel Shaulker, Thodoris Tsilivis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23896

Interdependent Bilateral Trade: Information vs Approximation
Welfare maximization in bilateral trade has been extensively studied in recent years. Previous literature obtained incentive-compatible approximation mechanisms only for the private values case. In this paper, we study welfare maximization in bilateral trade with interdependent values. Designing mechanisms for interdependent settings is much more challenging because the values of the players depend on the private information of the others, requiring complex belief updates and strategic inferenc…

Production Heterogeneity in Collective Labor Supply Models with Children
Charles Gauthier
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18810 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.18810…

Production Heterogeneity in Collective Labor Supply Models with Children
Children welfare is at the center of many welfare reforms such as cash transfers to families and training programs to parents. A key goal for policy-makers is to evaluate the costs and benefits of such reforms. The main challenge lies in that the outcome of interest, children welfare, is unobservable. To address this issue, I consider a collective labor supply model with children where adult members have preferences over their own leisure, expenditures, and children welfare. I show that the mod…

Replaced article(s) found for econ.TH. https://arxiv.org/list/econ.TH/new
[1/1]:
- Consumer Welfare Under Individual Heterogeneity
Charles Gauthier, Sebastiaan Maes, Raghav Malhotra

#Starmer demonstrates his inability to learn.
'one left MP commented: “This is desperate stuff. It shows how thin-skinned Keir Starmer is. He actually changed position on welfare as a result of what these MPs did."'
.....and
'Ms Sultana accused Starmer and his chief strategist Morgan McSweeney of being “insecure men. No vision. No compassion,” bent on removing those…

Who With Whom? Learning Optimal Matching Policies
Yagan Hazard, Toru Kitagawa
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.13567 https://arxiv.org/pdf/…

Who With Whom? Learning Optimal Matching Policies
There are many economic contexts where the productivity and welfare performance of institutions and policies depend on who matches with whom. Examples include caseworkers and job seekers in job search assistance programs, medical doctors and patients, teachers and students, attorneys and defendants, and tax auditors and taxpayers, among others. Although reallocating individuals through a change in matching policy can be less costly than training personnel or introducing a new program, methods f…

Flexible Bidding in Service-Oriented Combinatorial Spectrum Forward Auctions
Xiang Shao, Wei Wang, Guan Gui
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.19720 https://arxiv.…

Flexible Bidding in Service-Oriented Combinatorial Spectrum Forward Auctions
Traditional combinatorial spectrum auctions mainly rely on fixed bidding and matching processes, which limit participants' ability to adapt their strategies and often result in suboptimal social welfare in dynamic spectrum sharing environments. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approximately truthful combinatorial forward auction scheme with a flexible bidding mechanism aimed at enhancing resource efficiency and maximizing social welfare. In the proposed scheme, each buyer submit…

Crosslisted article(s) found for cs.AI. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.AI/new
[4/6]:
- Welfare-Centric Clustering
Claire Jie Zhang, Seyed A. Esmaeili, Jamie Morgenstern

Fish experience excruciating pain during slaughter, a new study confirms https://www.speciesunite.com/news-stories/fish-can-experience-intense-pain-during-slaughter-a-new-study-confirms?utm_source=Mastodon

Fish experience excruciating pain during slaughter, a new study confirms — Species Unite
New research confirms fish experience prolonged and severe pain during slaughter, raising urgent questions about animal welfare in the seafood industry.

Too Noisy to Collude? Algorithmic Collusion Under Laplacian Noise
Niuniu Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02800 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.02800

Too Noisy to Collude? Algorithmic Collusion Under Laplacian Noise
The rise of autonomous pricing systems has sparked growing concern over algorithmic collusion in markets from retail to housing. This paper examines controlled information quality as an ex ante policy lever: by reducing the fidelity of data that pricing algorithms draw on, regulators can frustrate collusion before supracompetitive prices emerge. We show, first, that information quality is the central driver of competitive outcomes, shaping prices, profits, and consumer welfare. Second, we demon…

Monopoly Pricing with a Public Option
Teddy Mekonnen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.12779 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.12779

Monopoly Pricing with a Public Option
This paper examines how a profit-maximizing monopolist competes against a free but capacity-constrained public option. The monopolist strategically restricts its supply beyond standard monopoly levels, thereby intensifying congestion at the public option and increasing consumers' willingness-to-pay for guaranteed access. Expanding the capacity of the public option always reduces producer welfare and, counterintuitively, may also reduce consumer welfare. In contrast, introducing a monopolist to …

I do not like that we in Denmark and the EU have to spend so much on weapons and defence rather than welfare and quality of life. But I like even less the idea of sending my children to fight wars we were told couldn't happen and losing control over our own rights and protections.
And if we want to get anything done on a range of subjects from #ClimateChange and #BiodiversityCrisis to #democracy, #Humanrights, #equality and bodily autonomy as well as #techRegulation ethical AI then we need to carry the big sticks.
And we need to do all this without leaving Ukraine as a hostage to fortune.
However, we're here and we're not going away...

Rethinking Indonesia's Public Debt in the Era of Negative Interest Rate-Growth Differentials
Mervin Goklas Hamonangan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.18092 https://

Rethinking Indonesia's Public Debt in the Era of Negative Interest Rate-Growth Differentials
This study contributes to the discussion about how higher public debt may not be costly because of the negative interest rate-growth differentials by simulating OLG models introduced by Blanchard (2019) under uncertainty, showing debt and welfare dynamics in two scenarios: intergenerational transfers and debt rollovers in the case of Indonesia. The simulation is done by modifying the model parameters based on interest rate-growth differentials historic data from 2004-2019. It is found that the …

Devon farm footage prompts calls to ban restrictive pens for pregnant pigs https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/jun/13/calls-to-ban-restrictive-pens-for-pregnant-pigs-after-analysis-of-footage-fro…

Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores
Edith Elkind, Tzeh Yuan Neoh, Nicholas Teh
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.08810 https://arxiv.org/pdf/25…

Not in My Backyard! Temporal Voting Over Public Chores
We study a temporal voting model where voters have dynamic preferences over a set of public chores -- projects that benefit society, but impose individual costs on those affected by their implementation. We investigate the computational complexity of optimizing utilitarian and egalitarian welfare. Our results show that while optimizing the former is computationally straightforward, minimizing the latter is computationally intractable, even in very restricted cases. Nevertheless, we identify sev…

Smoothness Meets Autobidding: Tight Price of Anarchy Bounds for Simultaneous First-Price Auctions
Riccardo Colini-Baldeschi, Sophie Klumper, Twan Kroll, Stefano Leonardi, Guido Sch\"afer, Artem Tsikiridis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.20908

Smoothness Meets Autobidding: Tight Price of Anarchy Bounds for Simultaneous First-Price Auctions
Online advertising systems have recently transitioned to autobidding, enabling advertisers to delegate bidding decisions to automated agents. Each advertiser directs their agent to optimize a valuation-dependent objective subject to return-on-investment (ROI) or budget constraints. Given their relevance, there has been a surge in literature studying the liquid welfare price of anarchy (POA) of core auction formats in autobidding, among which simultaneous first-price auctions (FPA). These models…

Evaluating the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism with a Quantitative Trade Model
Noemi Walczak, Kenan Huremovi\'c, Armando Rungi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.23341

Evaluating the EU Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism with a Quantitative Trade Model
This paper examines the economic and environmental impacts of the European Carbon Border Adjustment Mechanism (CBAM). We develop a multi-country, multi-sector general equilibrium model with input-output linkages and characterise the general equilibrium response of trade flows, welfare and emissions. As far as we know, this is the first quantitative trade model that jointly endogenises the Emission Trading Scheme (ETS) allowances and CBAM prices. We find that the CBAM increases by 0.005\% the EU…

Network Heterogeneity and Value of Information
Kota Murayama
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.17660 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2506.17660…

Network Heterogeneity and Value of Information
This paper studies how payoff heterogeneity affects the value of information in beauty contest games. I show that public information provision is detrimental to welfare if and only if agents' Katz-Bonacich centralities exhibit specific forms of heterogeneity, stemming from the network of coordination motives. A key insight is that agents may value the commonality of information so differently that some are harmed by their neighbors knowing what others know. Leveraging this insight, I also show …

A Dynamic Approach to Collaborative Document Writing
Avital Finanser, Nimrod Talmon
https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.17489 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2508.17489

A Dynamic Approach to Collaborative Document Writing
We introduce a model for collaborative text aggregation in which an agent community coauthors a document, modeled as an unordered collection of paragraphs, using a dynamic mechanism: agents propose paragraphs and vote on those suggested by others. We formalize the setting and explore its realizations, concentrating on voting mechanisms that aggregate votes into a single, dynamic document. We focus on two desiderata: the eventual stability of the process and its expected social welfare. Followin…

Replaced article(s) found for econ.TH. https://arxiv.org/list/econ.TH/new
[1/1]:
- Optimal risk sharing, equilibria, and welfare with empirically realistic risk attitudes
Jean-Gabriel Lauzier, Liyuan Lin, Peter Wakker, Ruodu Wang

Homeownership as Life Cycle Goldmine: Evidence from Macrohistory
Yang Bai, Shize Li, Jialu Shen
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.17624 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507…

Homeownership as Life Cycle Goldmine: Evidence from Macrohistory
Should a household buy a home? Using data from 16 developed countries spanning 1870 to 2020, this study provides a resounding affirmative answer. Contrary to popular expert advice, homeownership enhances life cycle wealth by up to 9% and welfare by up to 23%, compared to all-equity investment strategy. Homeownership reduces wealth portfolio risk and improves wealth equality, though it comes at the cost of lower working-life wealth and curtailed financial asset holdings. Gains are heterogeneous:…

Two-Person Cooperative Games with delta-Rationality
Fang-Fang Tang, Yongsheng Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.16465 https://arxiv.org/p…

Two-Person Cooperative Games with delta-Rationality
A player's payoff is modeled as consisting of two parts: a rational-value part and a distortion-value part. It is argued that the (total) payoff function should be used to explain and predict the behaviors of the players, while the rational value function should be used to conduct welfare analysis of the final outcome. We use the Nash demand game to illustrate our model.

Replaced article(s) found for cs.GT. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.GT/new
[1/1]:
- Individual and Collective Welfare in Risk Sharing with Many States
Federico Echenique, Farzad Pourbabaee

Mitigating Financial Frictions in Agriculture: A Framework for Stablecoin Adoption
Xinyu Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.14970 https://…

Mitigating Financial Frictions in Agriculture: A Framework for Stablecoin Adoption
Persistent financial frictions - including price volatility, constrained credit access, and supply chain inefficiencies - have long hindered productivity and welfare in the global agricultural sector. This paper provides a theoretical and applied analysis of how fiat-collateralized stablecoins, a class of digital currency pegged to a stable asset like the U.S. dollar, can address these long-standing challenges. We develop a farm-level profit maximization model incorporating transaction costs an…

Central Bank Digital Currency: Demand Shocks and Optimal Monetary Policy
Hanfeng Chen, Maria Elena Filippin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.15048 https://

Central Bank Digital Currency: Demand Shocks and Optimal Monetary Policy
We study the implications of a central bank digital currency (CBDC) for the transmission of household preference shocks and for welfare in a New Keynesian framework where the CBDC competes with bank deposits for household resources and banks have market power. We show that an increase in the benefit of CBDC has a mildly expansionary effect, weakening bank market power and significantly reducing the deposit spread. As households economize on liquid asset holdings, they reduce both CBDC and depos…

Rethinking Competition as a Non-Beneficial Mechanism in Economic Systems
Marcelo S. Tedesco, Gonzalo Marquez
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11405 https://

Rethinking Competition as a Non-Beneficial Mechanism in Economic Systems
Persistent economic competition is often justified as a mechanism of innovation, efficiency, and welfare maximization. Yet empirical evidence across disciplines reveals that competition systematically generates fragility, inequality, and ecological degradation, emergent outcomes not of isolated failures but of underlying systemic dynamics. This work reconceptualizes economic ecosystems as real complex adaptive systems, structurally isomorphic with biological and social ecosystems. Integrating c…

Replaced article(s) found for econ.TH. https://arxiv.org/list/econ.TH/new
[1/1]:
- Individual and Collective Welfare in Risk Sharing with Many States
Federico Echenique, Farzad Pourbabaee