Humans cooperate a great deal in economic activity, but our two major models of equilibrium – Walrasian competitive in markets and Nash in games – portray us as only non-cooperative. In earlier work, I have proposed a model of cooperative decision making (Kantian optimization); here, I embed...

Climate stabilization requires low GHG emissions. Is this consistent with nondecreasing human welfare? Our welfare index, called quality of life (QuoL), emphasizes education, knowledge, and the environment. We calibrate a multigenerational model with education, physical capital, knowledge and...

Let there be a positive (exogenous) probability that, at each date, the human species will disappear. We postulate an Ethical Observer (EO) who maximizes intertemporal welfare under this uncertainty, with expected-utility preferences. Various social welfare criteria entail alternative von...

We postulate a two-region world, comprised of North (calibrated after the US) and South (calibrated after China). Our optimization results show the compatibility of the following three desiderata: (1) Global CO2 emissions follow a conservative path that leads to the stabilization of...

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agentsʼ abilities (to transform the resource into an...

Resource egalitarianism and welfare egalitarianism are two focal conceptions of distributive justice. We show in this paper that they share a solid common ground. To do so, we analyze a simple model of resource allocation in which agents’ abilities (to transform the resource into an...

Anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have caused atmospheric concentrations with no precedents in the last half a million years, inducing serious uncertainties about future climates and their effects on human welfare. Recent climate science supports the view that the climate...

Let there be a positive (exogenous)probability that, at each date, the human species will disappear. We postulate an Ethical Observer (EO) who maximizes intertemporal welfare under this uncertainty, with expected-utility preferences. Various social welfare criteria entail alternative von...

We postulate a two-region world, comprised of North (calibrated after the US) and South (calibrated after China). Our optimization results show the compatibility of the following three desiderata: (1) Global CO2 emissions follow a conservative path that leads to the stabilization of...

Sustainability has been largely replaced by discounted utilitarianism in contemporary climate-change economics. Our approach rejuvenates sustainability by expanding the conception of the quality of life, along the lines of the UN Human Development Reports, to include not only consumption, but...