The condition of Constrained Pareto optimality is a weaker version of the standard condition of Pareto Optimality employed in Economics which accounts for the fact that a potential planner (i.e. the government) may not be able to improve upon a decentralized market outcome, even if that outcome is inefficient. This will occur if she is limited by the same informational or institutional constraints as individual agents. Pareto efficiency, or Pareto optimality, is a central concept in game theory with broad applications in economics, engineering and the social sciences. ... U.S. Economic Calendar Economics at the Open Directory Project Economics textbooks on Wikibooks The Economists Economics A-Z Daily analysis of economics in the news (UK focus) Institutions and organizations Bureau of Labor Statistics - from the American Labor Department Center for Economic and Policy Research (USA) National Bureau...

The most common example is of a setting where individuals have private information (for example a labor market where own productivity is known to the worker but not to a potential employer, or a used car market where the quality of a car is known to the seller but not to the buyer) which results in moral hazard or adverse selection and a sub-optimal outcome. In such a case, a planner who wishes to improve the situation is unlikely to have access to any information that the participants in the markets do not have. Hence she cannot implement allocation rules which are based on idisoyncratic characteristics of individuals, for example "if a person is of type A, they pay price p1, but if of type B, they pay price p2" (see Lindahl prices). Essentially, only anonymous rules are allowed of the sort "Everyone pays price p" or rules based on observable behavior; "if any person chooses x at price px then they get a subsidy of ten dollars, and nothing otherwise" (see Mechanism design, Revelation princple and Pivotal mechanism). If there exists no allowed rule that can succesfully improve upon the market outcome, then that outcome is said to be Constrained-Pareto optimal. This section is studied by Argagui monopoli In law and economics, moral hazard is the name given to the risk that one party to a contract can change their behaviour to the detriment of the other party once the contract has been concluded. ... Adverse selection or anti-selection is a term used in economics and insurance. ... Mechanism design is a sub-field of game theory. ...

Note that the concept of Constrained Pareto optimality assumes benevolence on the part of the planner and hence it is distinct from the concept of government failure, which occurs when the policy making politicians fail to achieve an optimal outcome simply because they are not necessarily acting in the public's best interest. Government failure is a situation in which the government intervenes to correct for externalities and ends up making things worse. ...