In this essay, we read McKenzie's seventeen paragraphs of 1957 on “demand theory without a utility index” as an opening to the narrative of 20th-century demand theory, and as a lever for the understanding of what has now reached culmination as the neoclassical theory of demand. In tracking...

Models of insurance with adverse selection predict that only the best risks — those least likely to suffer a loss — are uninsured, a prediction at odds with coverage denials for pre-existing conditions. They also typically assume that insurance pro- vision is costless: the only cost is...

I show that local changes in five welfare measures are equal: a measure proposed by Radner (1993); consumers' surplus; the Slutsky change in real wealth; the Divisia quantity index, and Debreu's (1951) coefficient of resource utilization (the last two rescaled in units of a numeraire good)

We solve the principal-agent problem of a monopolist insurer selling to an agent whose riskiness (loss chance) is private information, a problem introduced in Stiglitz's (1977) seminal paper. For an \emph{arbitrary} type distribution, we prove several properties of optimal menus, such as...

We solve the principal-agent problem of a monopolist insurer selling to an agent whose riskiness (chance of a loss) is private information, a problem introduced in Stiglitz (1977)'s seminal paper. We prove several properties of optimal menus: the highest type gets full coverage (efficiency at...

We consider the effect of information on the ex ante average risk-free rate and the equity premium in a standard exchange economy with a representative agent. We show that information always increases the average risk-free rate. Clearly, perfect information eliminates the equity premium;...