  Welfare economics relies on access to agents' utility functions: we revisit
classical questions in welfare economics, assuming access to data on agents'
past choices instead of their utilities. Our main result considers the
existence of utilities that render a given allocation Pareto optimal. We show
that a candidate allocation is efficient for some utilities consistent with the
choice data if and only if it is efficient for an incomplete relation derived
from the revealed preference relations and convexity. Similar ideas are used to
make counterfactual choices for a single consumer, policy comparisons by the
Kaldor criterion, and offer bounds on the degree of inefficiency in a Pareto
suboptimal allocation.
