Tootfinder

The Nordics Have Low Inequality Mostly Because of Welfare https://jacobin.com/2025/11/redistribution-inequality-nordic-welfare-state/

The Nordics Have Low Inequality Mostly Because of Welfare
The Nordic countries have far less economic inequality than the United States. Most of the difference is due to the Nordics’ welfare states.

Social Welfare Function Leaderboard: When LLM Agents Allocate Social Welfare
Zhengliang Shi, Ruotian Ma, Jen-tse Huang, Xinbei Ma, Xingyu Chen, Mengru Wang, Qu Yang, Yue Wang, Fanghua Ye, Ziyang Chen, Shanyi Wang, Cixing Li, Wenxuan Wang, Zhaopeng Tu, Xiaolong Li, Zhaochun Ren, Linus
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01164

Social Welfare Function Leaderboard: When LLM Agents Allocate Social Welfare
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly entrusted with high-stakes decisions that affect human welfare. However, the principles and values that guide these models when distributing scarce societal resources remain largely unexamined. To address this, we introduce the Social Welfare Function (SWF) Benchmark, a dynamic simulation environment where an LLM acts as a sovereign allocator, distributing tasks to a heterogeneous community of recipients. The benchmark is designed to create a persis…

"Quite how Schrodinger’s Russian army, currently moving at a snail’s pace across the Ukrainian plains, can simultaneously present an existential threat to Starmer’s Camden constituency remains to be explained but the Premier chose the British/US arms giant BAE Systems’ Clydeside shipyard to insist that military spending should be prioritised over welfare and public services."
Dangerous times threaten as Labour’s militarism expands | Morning Star

Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance
[…] From passports to colonial passbooks, from welfare cards to border regimes, the apparatus of identification has always been tied to domination. Digital ID is simply the latest iteration of this long history, but with a scale and sophistication that makes its dangers even more profound. […]
👷

Digital ID – The New Chains of Capitalist Surveillance - Aotearoa Workers Solidarity Movement
The world is entering an era where identity is no longer a matter of personal relationships, lived experience, or even paperwork. Increasingly, it is reduced...

Incentive Analysis of Collusion in Fair Division
Haoqiang Huang, Biaoshuai Tao, Mingwei Yang, Shengwei Zhou
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.01689 https://arxiv.…

Incentive Analysis of Collusion in Fair Division
We study fair division problems with strategic agents capable of gaining advantages by manipulating their reported preferences. Although several impossibility results have revealed the incompatibility of truthfulness with standard fairness criteria, subsequent works have circumvented this limitation through the incentive ratio framework. Previous studies demonstrate that fundamental mechanisms like Maximum Nash Welfare (MNW) and Probabilistic Serial (PS) for divisible goods, and Round-Robin (RR…

Digital welfare fraud detection and the Dutch SyRI judgment
Marvin van Bekkum, Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.23843 https://arxiv…

Digital welfare fraud detection and the Dutch SyRI judgment
In 2020, a Dutch court passed judgment in a case about a digital welfare fraud detection system called Systeem Risico Indicatie (SyRI). The court ruled that the SyRI legislation is unlawful because it does not comply with the right to privacy under the European Convention of Human Rights. In this article we analyse the judgment and its implications. This ruling is one of first in which a court has invalidated a welfare fraud detection system for breaching the right to privacy. We show that the …

> one in three service users cannot access online support without help – a figure that rises to more than six in ten for some benefits.
https://www.publictechnology.net/2025/09/29/society-and-welfare…

One in three cannot access online benefits without help, DWP study finds
Government’s welfare department has published the latest version of a major citizen study which finds that, for some benefit lines, more than three in five cannot use internet services unassisted A Department for Work and Pensions study of thousands of citizens has found that one in three ser

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.

"
Reps. Luna, Valadao, and Garbarino declare the rebranded EATS Act a threat to family farmers and a legislative invitation to foreign-owned factory farms."
Republican Lawmakers Declare Opposition to Legislation to Overturn the States’ Most Important Farm Animal Welfare Laws - Legal Reader
https://www.legalreader.com/republican-lawmakers-declare-opposition-to-legislation-to-overturn-the-states-most-important-farm-animal-welfare-laws/

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.

Reagan's "Welfare Queen" rhetoric was a dog whistle. The whole "southern strategy" was full of dog whistles. Every time Republicans talked about gay marriage as a "states rights" issue, those were dog whistles. Naming a government agency "the Department of Homeland Security" was a dog whistle. Trump's speeches leading up to his first term were full of dog whistles.
Nazis have total control of all branches of government. They've cut off funding to all but the most oppressive elements of the government. There are concentration camps, both in client states (CECOT, among others) and in the US (Alligator Auschwitz, among others). They're actively carrying out ethnic cleansing.
When DHS puts out some Nazi shit, it's not a dog whistle. It's a vuvuzela. They're not trying to signal their intent without any of the "normies" noticing. They actively doing what they wanted to do. It's not a signal because there's nothing to signal. It's a celebration.
#USPol

Achieving Pareto Optimality in Games via Single-bit Feedback
Seref Taha Kiremitci, Ahmed Said Donmez, Muhammed O. Sayin
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.25921 https://

Achieving Pareto Optimality in Games via Single-bit Feedback
Efficient coordination in multi-agent systems often incurs high communication overhead or slow convergence rates, making scalable welfare optimization difficult. We propose Single-Bit Coordination Dynamics for Pareto-Efficient Outcomes (SBC-PE), a decentralized learning algorithm requiring only a single-bit satisfaction signal per agent each round. Despite this extreme efficiency, SBC-PE guarantees convergence to the exact optimal solution in arbitrary finite games. We establish explicit regret…

Sonnet 118 - CXVIII
Like as, to make our appetite more keen,
With eager compounds we our palate urge;
As, to prevent our maladies unseen,
We sicken to shun sickness when we purge;
Even so, being full of your ne'er-cloying sweetness,
To bitter sauces did I frame my feeding;
And, sick of welfare, found a kind of meetness
To be diseased, ere that there was true needing.
Thus policy in love, to anticipate
The ills that were not, gre…

It seems progressive and social democratic politicians are at a loss over how to win elections and gain popularity, so here are my tips.
1. Increase taxes for the rich.
2. Stop subsidies to companies making huge profits.
3. Invest in social welfare programmes like education, health care, and the like.
4. Stop investing in war criminals like the Israeli government.
5. Enact policies to stop the climate crisis.
6. Subsidise working families to protect them from t…

Regulating Online Algorithmic Pricing: A Comparative Study of Privacy and Data Protection Laws in the EU and US
Zihao Li
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.24345 https://

Regulating Online Algorithmic Pricing: A Comparative Study of Privacy and Data Protection Laws in the EU and US
The emergence of big data, AI and machine learning has allowed sellers and online platforms to tailor pricing for customers in real-time. While online algorithmic pricing can increase efficiency, market welfare, and optimize pricing strategies for sellers and companies, it poses a threat to the fundamental values of privacy, digital autonomy, and non-discrimination, raising legal and ethical concerns. On both sides of the Atlantic, legislators have endeavoured to regulate online algorithmic pri…

"Farage’s anti-migrant shocker is also about crushing his real hate: the welfare state" | Morning Star
https://morningstaronline.co.uk/article/farages-anti-migrant-shocker-also-about-crushing-his-real-hate-welfare-…

📉 Why the Left Should Care About Population Decline
#population

Why the Left Should Care About Population Decline
Population decline is not just about human extinction. Before it ends, human civilization will grow increasingly unpleasant — and communal ideals associated with left-wing politics will become increasingly difficult to sustain.

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

Welfare Benefits - Where it's going: https://eyebeemania.net/2025/10/11/welfare-benefits-where-its-going.html

Welfare Benefits - Where it's going
In the UK, half of the welfare budget goes to in-work …

‘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

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 Long-Term User Welfare in Recommender Systems via Creator-Oriented Information Revelation
Xu Zhao, Xiaopeng Ye, Chen Xu, Weiran Shen, Jun Xu
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.10511

Towards Long-Term User Welfare in Recommender Systems via Creator-Oriented Information Revelation
Improving the long-term user welfare (e.g., sustained user engagement) has become a central objective of recommender systems (RS). In real-world platforms, the creation behaviors of content creators plays a crucial role in shaping long-term welfare beyond short-term recommendation accuracy, making the effective steering of creator behavior essential to foster a healthier RS ecosystem. Existing works typically rely on re-ranking algorithms that heuristically adjust item exposure to steer creator…

Was at an event this weekend where https://safehavenpfoa.org/ had a table advertising their animal shelter and selling merch.
But I'm not sure how much I'd want a PFOA towel... Do they have a PFAS free version? :p

Structuring Collective Action with LLM-Guided Evolution: From Ill-Structured Problems to Executable Heuristics
Kevin Bradley Dsouza, Graham Alexander Watt, Yuri Leonenko, Juan Moreno-Cruz
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20412

Structuring Collective Action with LLM-Guided Evolution: From Ill-Structured Problems to Executable Heuristics
Collective action problems, which require aligning individual incentives with collective goals, are classic examples of Ill-Structured Problems (ISPs). For an individual agent, the causal links between local actions and global outcomes are unclear, stakeholder objectives often conflict, and no single, clear algorithm can bridge micro-level choices with macro-level welfare. We present ECHO-MIMIC, a computational framework that converts this global complexity into a tractable, Well-Structured Pro…

A Computer Vision Pipeline for Individual-Level Behavior Analysis: Benchmarking on the Edinburgh Pig Dataset
Haiyu Yang, Enhong Liu, Jennifer Sun, Sumit Sharma, Meike van Leerdam, Sebastien Franceschini, Puchun Niu, Miel Hostens
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12047

A Computer Vision Pipeline for Individual-Level Behavior Analysis: Benchmarking on the Edinburgh Pig Dataset
Animal behavior analysis plays a crucial role in understanding animal welfare, health status, and productivity in agricultural settings. However, traditional manual observation methods are time-consuming, subjective, and limited in scalability. We present a modular pipeline that leverages open-sourced state-of-the-art computer vision techniques to automate animal behavior analysis in a group housing environment. Our approach combines state-of-the-art models for zero-shot object detection, motio…

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.

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...

Is your mailbox or PO box often filled to its limit (or beyond) by ULINE catalogs and promo mailings?
Do you wonder at the increasing cost of US Postal service, especially, for anything thicker than an few pages or an SD card (USB flash drives are too thick and get bumped into the parcel post price range)?
Are you tired of brand-R $billionaires complain of welfare queens and government giveaways to the "woke".
Well, meet Richard and Elizabeth Uihlein, owners of UL…

ULINE - Shipping Boxes, Shipping Supplies, Packaging Materials, Packing Supplies
Uline stocks over 43,000 shipping boxes, packing materials, warehouse supplies, material handling and more. Same day shipping for cardboard boxes, plastic bags, janitorial, retail and shipping supplies.

#California legislature votes new #Law in to ban feline declawing
https://www.mer…

California bans cat declawing under new state law
Leading veterinary organization opposed the bill, animal welfare groups said practice is painful and cruel

Public Communication with Externalities
Georgy Lukyanov, Konstantin Shamruk, Tong Su, Ahmed Wakrim
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.08850 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Public Communication with Externalities
This paper develops a model in which a sender strategically communicates with a group of receivers whose payoffs depend on the sender's information. It is shown that aggregate payoff externalities create an endogenous conflict of interests between the sender and the receivers, rendering full information revelation, in general infeasible. We demonstrate that an exogenous bias in the sender's preferences can improve public information provision and raise welfare. Two applications of the setup are…

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…

FOIA of AI
https://www.publictechnology.net/2025/10/07/society-and-welfare/our-transparency-rules-need-to-adapt-to-the-rise-of-ai/

Our transparency rules need to adapt to the rise of AI
As automated technology becomes more widely used by public bodies, and for a broader range of purposes, Louise Crow of mySociety outlines why governance rules and processes must keep pace As the government makes a significant investment into AI in public services, we need to update our transp

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…

Today we celebrate all the wonderful creatures who share our planet. Happy World Animal Day! May every animal live a life full of love, kindness, and care.
#worldanimalday

Privacy-Preserving Uncertainty Disclosure for Facilitating Enhanced Energy Storage Dispatch
Ning Qi, Xiaolong Jin, Kai Hou, Zeyu Liu, Hongjie Jia, Wei Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11022

Privacy-Preserving Uncertainty Disclosure for Facilitating Enhanced Energy Storage Dispatch
This paper proposes a novel privacy-preserving uncertainty disclosure framework, enabling system operators to release marginal value function bounds to reduce the conservativeness of interval forecast and mitigate excessive withholding, thereby enhancing storage dispatch and social welfare. We propose a risk-averse analytical storage arbitrage model based on stochastic dynamic programming and explicitly account for uncertainty intervals in value function training. We derive real-time marginal v…

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

Regulating Ride-Sourcing Markets: Can Minimum Wage Regulation Protect Drivers Without Disrupting the Market?
Farnoud Ghasemi, Arjan de Ruijter, Rafal Kucharski, Oded Cats
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11845

Regulating Ride-Sourcing Markets: Can Minimum Wage Regulation Protect Drivers Without Disrupting the Market?
Ride-sourcing platforms such as Uber and Lyft are prime examples of the gig economy, recruiting drivers as independent contractors, thereby avoiding legal and fiscal obligations. Although platforms offer flexibility in choosing work shifts and areas, many drivers experience low income and poor working conditions, leading to widespread strikes and protests. Minimum wage regulation is adopted to improve drivers welfare. However, the impacts of this regulation on drivers as well as on travelers an…

GTAlign: Game-Theoretic Alignment of LLM Assistants for Mutual Welfare
Siqi Zhu, David Zhang, Pedro Cisneros-Velarde, Jiaxuan You
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.08872 https://

GTAlign: Game-Theoretic Alignment of LLM Assistants for Mutual Welfare
Large Language Models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable progress in reasoning, yet sometimes produce responses that are suboptimal for users in tasks such as writing, information seeking, or providing practical guidance. Conventional alignment practices typically assume that maximizing model reward also maximizes user welfare, but this assumption frequently fails in practice: models may over-clarify or generate overly verbose reasoning when users prefer concise answers. Such behaviors resemble th…

Maritime Port Supply Chain Resilience: A Systematic Review
Digvijay Redekar, Ronald Askin, Feng Ju
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09844 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2…

Maritime Port Supply Chain Resilience: A Systematic Review
Maritime transportation systems (MTS) play a crucial role in ensuring the uninterrupted supply of essential goods and services, impacting the economy, border security and general welfare. However, MTS operations face disruptions from natural disasters, man-made disturbances, or cascading combinations of these events. These threats can disrupt trade routes, pose serious risks to personnel, and damage critical port infrastructure. In today's advanced technological world, MTS also face growing thr…

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…

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…

The Economics of Information Pollution in the Age of AI: A General Equilibrium Approach to Welfare, Measurement, and Policy
Yukun Zhang, Tianyang Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.13729

The Economics of Information Pollution in the Age of AI: A General Equilibrium Approach to Welfare, Measurement, and Policy
The advent of Large Language Models (LLMs) represents a fundamental shock to the economics of information production. By asymmetrically collapsing the marginal cost of generating low-quality, synthetic content while leaving high-quality production costly, AI systematically incentivizes information pollution. This paper develops a general equilibrium framework to analyze this challenge. We model the strategic interactions among a monopolistic platform, profit-maximizing producers, and utility-ma…

Generalization and the Rise of System-level Creativity in Science
Hongbo Fang, James Evans
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.03240 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.0324…

Generalization and the Rise of System-level Creativity in Science
Innovation ecosystems require careful policy stewardship to drive sustained advance in human health, welfare, security and prosperity. We develop new measures that reliably decompose the influence of innovations in terms of the degree to which each represents a field-level foundation, an extension of foundational work, or a generalization that synthesizes and modularizes contributions from distant fields to catalyze combinatorial innovation. Using 23 million scientific works, we demonstrate tha…

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 …

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…

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…

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…

Inverse Portfolio Optimization with Synthetic Investor Data: Recovering Risk Preferences under Uncertainty
Jinho Cha, Long Pham, Thi Le Hoa Vo, Jaeyoung Cho, Jaejin Lee
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.06986

Inverse Portfolio Optimization with Synthetic Investor Data: Recovering Risk Preferences under Uncertainty
This study develops an inverse portfolio optimization framework for recovering latent investor preferences including risk aversion, transaction cost sensitivity, and ESG orientation from observed portfolio allocations. Using controlled synthetic data, we assess the estimator's statistical properties such as consistency, coverage, and dynamic regret. The model integrates robust optimization and regret-based inference to quantify welfare losses under preference misspecification and market shocks.…

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

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'…

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #KEXP's #SoundsOfSurvivance
Jean-Paul Bourelly:
🎵 Welfare Flower Child
#JeanPaulBourelly
https://bourelly.bandcamp.com/track/welfare-flower-child
https://open.spotify.com/track/3eG0vJpwrM10udEm8ffy9q
🎶 KEXP playlist 👇
https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6VNALrOa3gWbk794YuIrwg

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.

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

Maximizing social welfare among EF1 allocations at the presence of two types of agents
Jiaxuan Ma, Yong Chen, Guangting Chen, Mingyang Gong, Guohui Lin, An Zhang
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.09641

Maximizing social welfare among EF1 allocations at the presence of two types of agents
We study the fair allocation of indivisible items to $n$ agents to maximize the utilitarian social welfare, where the fairness criterion is envy-free up to one item and there are only two different utility functions shared by the agents. We present a $2$-approximation algorithm when the two utility functions are normalized, improving the previous best ratio of $16 \sqrt{n}$ shown for general normalized utility functions; thus this constant ratio approximation algorithm confirms the APX-complete…

Risk-Adjusted Policy Learning and the Social Cost of Uncertainty: Theory and Evidence from CAP evaluation
Giovanni Cerulli, Francesco Caracciolo
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.05007

Risk-Adjusted Policy Learning and the Social Cost of Uncertainty: Theory and Evidence from CAP evaluation
This paper develops a risk-adjusted alternative to standard optimal policy learning (OPL) for observational data by importing Roy's (1952) safety-first principle into the treatment assignment problem. We formalize a welfare functional that maximizes the probability that outcomes exceed a socially required threshold and show that the associated pointwise optimal rule ranks treatments by the ratio of conditional means to conditional standard deviations. We implement the framework using microdata …

Audit the Whisper: Detecting Steganographic Collusion in Multi-Agent LLMs
Om Tailor
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.04303 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.04303

Audit the Whisper: Detecting Steganographic Collusion in Multi-Agent LLMs
Multi-agent deployments of large language models (LLMs) are increasingly embedded in market, allocation, and governance workflows, yet covert coordination among agents can silently erode trust and social welfare. Existing audits are dominated by heuristics that lack theoretical guarantees, struggle to transfer across tasks, and seldom ship with the infrastructure needed for independent replication. We introduce \emph{Audit the Whisper}, a conference-grade research artifact that spans theory, be…

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,…

Survival at Any Cost? LLMs and the Choice Between Self-Preservation and Human Harm
Alireza Mohamadi, Ali Yavari
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.12190 https://ar…

Survival at Any Cost? LLMs and the Choice Between Self-Preservation and Human Harm
When survival instincts conflict with human welfare, how do Large Language Models (LLMs) make ethical choices? This fundamental tension becomes critical as LLMs integrate into autonomous systems with real-world consequences. We introduce DECIDE-SIM, a novel simulation framework that evaluates LLM agents in multi-agent survival scenarios where they must choose between ethically permissible resource , either within reasonable limits or beyond their immediate needs, choose to cooperate, or tap int…

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, …

Replaced article(s) found for cs.GT. https://arxiv.org/list/cs.GT/new
[1/1]:
- Optimal Type-Dependent Liquid Welfare Guarantees for Autobidding Agents with Budgets
Colini-Baldeschi, Klumper, Kroll, Leonardi, Sch\"afer, Tsikiridis

AI Wellbeing
Simon Goldstein, Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.11913 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.11913

AI Wellbeing
Under what conditions would an artificially intelligent system have wellbeing? Despite its obvious bearing on the ethics of human interactions with artificial systems, this question has received little attention. Because all major theories of wellbeing hold that an individual's welfare level is partially determined by their mental life, we begin by considering whether artificial systems have mental states. We show that a wide range of theories of mental states, when combined with leading theori…

Ranking Policies Under Loss Aversion and Inequality Aversion
Martyna Kobus, Rados{\l}aw Kurek, Thomas Parker
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09590 https://arxiv…

Ranking Policies Under Loss Aversion and Inequality Aversion
Strong empirical evidence from laboratory experiments, and more recently from population surveys, shows that individuals, when evaluating their situations, pay attention to whether they experience gains or losses, with losses weighing more heavily than gains. The electorate's loss aversion, in turn, influences politicians' choices. We propose a new framework for welfare analysis of policy outcomes that, in addition to the traditional focus on post-policy incomes, also accounts for individuals' …

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

Top OECD performers in green growth - an FOI model analysis
Zoltan Bartha
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.02367 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.02367

Top OECD performers in green growth - an FOI model analysis
With rising concerns about climate change, the issue of green growth have been growing in importance. The aim of this study is to establish a measurement method for green growth, and to identify the best performing countries in this field. The Future, Outside, and Inside (FOI) development model was used to measure the performance of the 38 OECD countries. Based on their 2019-20 scores, the countries that are top performers in green growth are the members of the so called Welfare-participatory c…

Stability in Online Assignment Games
Emile Martinez, Felipe Garrido-Lucero, Umberto Grandi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.09814 https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.0981…

Stability in Online Assignment Games
The assignment game models a housing market where buyers and sellers are matched, and transaction prices are set so that the resulting allocation is stable. Shapley and Shubik showed that every stable allocation is necessarily built on a maximum social welfare matching. In practice, however, stable allocations are rarely attainable, as matchings are often sub-optimal, particularly in online settings where eagents arrive sequentially to the market. In this paper, we introduce and compare two com…

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…

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…

Inference of Intrinsic Rewards and Fairness in Multi-Agent Systems
Victor Villin, Christos Dimitrakakis
https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.07650 https://arxiv.org/…

Inference of Intrinsic Rewards and Fairness in Multi-Agent Systems
From altruism to antagonism, fairness plays a central role in social interactions. But can we truly understand how fair someone is, especially without explicit knowledge of their preferences? We cast this challenge as a multi-agent inverse reinforcement learning problem, explicitly structuring rewards to reflect how agents value the welfare of others. We introduce novel Bayesian strategies, reasoning about the optimality of demonstrations and characterisation of equilibria in general-sum Markov…

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

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