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

The Orlando Sentinel got a cease-and-desist from Florida's DCF that claims its reporter coerced families for a story on a foundation tied to Gov. DeSantis' wife (Mike Schneider/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/orlando-sen

Florida agency tells newspaper to halt reporting angle on foundation associated with governor's wife
Florida’s child welfare agency has sent a letter to a newspaper telling it to “cease and desist” its reporting on foster families for a story about a nonprofit associated with Gov. Ron DeSantis’ wife. The foundation is the subject of an investigation. The Orlando Sentinel received the letter on Friday from the Department of Children and Families. The letter claims the newspaper’s Tallahassee reporter intimidated foster families who had received money from the Hope Florida Foundation w…

Starmer regime did the right thing on winter fuel. I don't need it but mine will be taxed, as I urged last year.
However, in the scale of poverty reduction, the 2 child benefit is much higher priority.
#welfare

Valuing Diffuse Global Public Goods from Satellite Constellations: Evidence from GPS and Airline Delays
Lev Ricanati
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08209 https…

Valuing Diffuse Global Public Goods from Satellite Constellations: Evidence from GPS and Airline Delays
This paper studies the welfare impact of discrete improvements to global public goods in the context of the Global Positioning System (GPS). Specifically, I find that by disabling Selective Availability in May, 2000, and thus significantly increasing the accuracy of GPS, the United States generated at least \$268 million (2000 dollars) of additional welfare gains. To quantify this welfare impact, I apply a difference-in-differences model to the Bureau of Transportation Statistics's Airline On-T…

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.…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.15996 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Asymptotically Fair and Truthful Allocation of Public Goods
We study the fair and truthful allocation of m divisible public items among n agents, each with distinct preferences for the items. To aggregate agents' preferences fairly, we focus on finding a core solution. For divisible items, a core solution always exists and can be calculated by maximizing the Nash welfare objective. However, such a solution is easily manipulated; agents might have incentives to misreport their preferences. To mitigate this, the current state-of-the-art finds an approxima…

Demand that the European Union does not leave millions of dogs and cats unprotected against illegal breeding! #AnimalRights

Demand that the European Union does not leave millions of dogs and cats unprotected against illegal breeding!
While MEPs prepare to vote on a groundbreaking regulation on the welfare of dogs and cats, animal welfare organizations warn: the proposed exemptions could leave millions of animals unprotected.

Florida agency tells newspaper to halt reporting angle on foundation associated with governor's wife (Mike Schneider/Associated Press)
https://apnews.com/article/orlando-sentinel-florida-desantis-welfare-9636452a8bf8eb230489513db64d86f7
http://www.memeorandum.com/250609/p104#a250609p104

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…

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.

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

How urban scaling and resource distribution shape social welfare and migration dynamics
Bryce Morsky
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03384 https://

How urban scaling and resource distribution shape social welfare and migration dynamics
Many outputs of cities scale in universal ways, including infrastructure, crime, and economic activity. Through a mathematical model, this study investigates the interplay between such scaling laws in human organization and governmental allocations of resources, focusing on impacts to migration patterns and social welfare. We find that if superlinear scaling resources of cities -- such as economic and social activity -- are the primary drivers of city dwellers' utility, then cities tend to conv…

The US Postal Service has an animal welfare problem
https://thehill.com/opinion/congress-blog/5334999-usps-transporting-live-animals/

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

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,…

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."

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…

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.

Welfare Reform: Consequences for the Children
Marianne Simonsen, Lars Skipper, Jeffrey A. Smith
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03927 https://

Welfare Reform: Consequences for the Children
This paper uses register-based data to analyze the consequences of a recent major Danish welfare reform for children's academic performance and well-being. In addition to work requirements, the reform brought about considerable reductions in welfare transfers. We implement a comparative event study that contrasts outcomes for individuals on welfare at the time of reform announcement before and after the implementation of the reform with the parallel development in outcomes for an uncontaminated…

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.

'[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

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.01231 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Consumer Welfare under Individual Heterogeneity
Welfare effects of price changes are often estimated with cross-sections; however, such data do not identify demand models with heterogeneous consumers. We develop a method that leverages moments of demand to construct a local approximation to the curvature of the expenditure function, which is essential for welfare analysis. Our method applies to arbitrary cross-sections and delivers a nonparametric approximation to the entire distribution of consumer welfare, robust to unobserved preference h…

The power of mediators: Price of anarchy and stability in Bayesian games with submodular social welfare
Kaito Fujii
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02655 https:…

The power of mediators: Price of anarchy and stability in Bayesian games with submodular social welfare
This paper investigates the role of mediators in Bayesian games by examining their impact on social welfare through the price of anarchy (PoA) and price of stability (PoS). Mediators can communicate with players to guide them toward equilibria of varying quality, and different communication protocols lead to a variety of equilibrium concepts collectively known as Bayes (coarse) correlated equilibria. To analyze these equilibrium concepts, we consider a general class of Bayesian games with submo…

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 …

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

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.

#Norway #China #Anarchism #Anarchy

🇺🇦 #NowPlaying on #BBC6Music's #LoudAndProud
Grace Petrie:
🎵 Farewell To Welfare BBC 6 Music Session 2011
#GracePetrie
https://open.spotify.com/track/3ZtfmhFiNMecGDbWYmkHeH

Disentangling Barriers to Welfare Program Participation with Semiparametric and Mixed Effect Approaches
Lei Bill Wang, Sooa Ahn
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.03457

Disentangling Barriers to Welfare Program Participation with Semiparametric and Mixed Effect Approaches
This paper examines why eligible households do not participate in welfare programs. Under the assumption that there exist some observed fully attentive groups, we model take-up as a two-stage process: attention followed by choice. We do so with two novel approaches. Drawing inspiration from the demand estimation for stochastically attentive consumers literature, Approach I is semiparametric with a nonparametric attention function and a parametric choice function. It uses fully attentive househo…

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

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

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

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2205.14296 has been replaced.
link: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=a

Approximability Landscape of Welfare Maximization within Fair Allocations
Fair allocation of indivisible goods studies allocating $m$ goods among $n$ agents in a fair manner. While fairness is a fundamental requirement in many real-world applications, it often conflicts with (economic) efficiency. This raises a natural and important question: How can we identify the most welfare-efficient allocation among all fair allocations? This paper answers from the perspective of computational complexity. Specifically, we study the problem of maximizing utilitarian social welfa…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.24191 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Flexible Demand Manipulation
We develop a simple framework to analyze how targeted persuasive advertising shapes market power and welfare. A designer flexibly manipulates the demand curve by influencing individual valuations at a cost. A monopolist prices against this manipulated demand curve. We fully characterize the form of optimal advertising plans under ex-ante and ex-post welfare measures. Flexibility per se is powerful, and can substantially harm or benefit consumers vis-a-vis uniform advertising. We discuss implica…

Frictions and Welfare in Monopolistic Competition
Francesco Del Prato, Paolo Zacchia
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24460 https://arxiv.o…

Frictions and Welfare in Monopolistic Competition
In a heterogeneous firm economy with monopolistic competition, could informational asymmetries between entrepreneurs and financial intermediaries sometimes improve welfare? We study this question by developing a model where banks finance entrepreneurs under asymmetric information. While aggregate productivity decreases with informational frictions, we find that welfare can be maximized at intermediate levels of information asymmetry due to a trade-off between productivity and product variety. A…

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…

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.

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.14879 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_eco…

Limited attention and models of choice: A behavioral equivalence
We show that many models of choice can be alternatively represented as special cases of choice with limited attention (Masatlioglu, Nakajima, and Ozbay, 2012), singling out the properties of the unobserved attention filters that explain the observed choices.For each specification, information about the DM's consideration sets and preference is inferred from violations of the contraction consistency axiom, and it is compared with the welfare indications obtained from equivalent models. Remarkabl…

Fairly Wired: Towards Leximin-Optimal Division of Electricity
Eden Hartman, Dinesh Kumar Baghel, Erel Segal-Halevi
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.02193 https:/…

Fairly Wired: Towards Leximin-Optimal Division of Electricity
In many parts of the world - particularly in developing countries - the demand for electricity exceeds the available supply. In such cases, it is impossible to provide electricity to all households simultaneously. This raises a fundamental question: how should electricity be allocated fairly? In this paper, we explore this question through the lens of egalitarianism - a principle that emphasizes equality by prioritizing the welfare of the worst-off households. One natural rule that aligns with …

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…

Pricing the Right to Renege in Search Markets: Evidence from Trucking
Richard Faltings
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.01650 https://arxiv…

Pricing the Right to Renege in Search Markets: Evidence from Trucking
In many markets, advance interim contracts include an explicit right to renege, granting one party the option to switch to more efficient matches that emerge later in the search process. This paper studies the formation and welfare implications of such interim contracts, leveraging novel data from a brokerage firm in the trucking industry. The broker allocates advance shipment contracts to carriers through a dynamic auction mechanism and penalizes cancellations through a reputational mechanism.…

This https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.07501 has been replaced.
initial toot: https://mastoxiv.page/@arXiv_csGT_…

The Complexity of Pure Strategy Relevant Equilibria in Concurrent Games
We study rational synthesis problems for concurrent games with $ω$-regular objectives. Our model of rationality considers only pure strategy Nash equilibria that satisfy either a social welfare or Pareto optimality condition with respect to an $ω$-regular objective for each agent. This extends earlier work on equilibria in concurrent games, without consideration about their quality. Our results show that the existence of Nash equilibria satisfying social welfare conditions can be computed as …

Online Fair Allocations with Binary Valuations and Beyond
Yuanyuan Wang, Tianze Wei
https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.24321 https://arxiv.or…

Online Fair Allocations with Binary Valuations and Beyond
In an online fair allocation problem, a sequence of indivisible items arrives online and needs to be allocated to offline agents immediately and irrevocably. In our paper, we study the online allocation of either goods or chores. We adapt popular fairness notions, including envy-freeness up to one item (EF1) and maximin share fairness (MMS), and use utilitarian social welfare (USW) to measure efficiency. For both settings of items, we present a series of positive results regarding the existence…

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 …

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…

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

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…

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.

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…