The present study examines whether the Preston curve reflects a causal impact of income on longevity or, for example, factors correlated with both income and life expectancy. In order to understand the Preston curve better, we develop a model of optimal intertemporal consumption in which the...

We develop a life cycle model featuring an optimal retirement decision in the presence of physiological aging. In modeling the aging process we draw on recent advances within the fields of biology and medicine. In the model individuals decide on optimal consumption during life, the age of...

We consider the risk premium demanded by a decision maker with wealth x in order to be indifferent between obtaining a new level of wealth y1 with certainty, or to participate in a lottery which either results in unchanged present wealth or a level of wealth y2 y1. We define the relative risk...

Most workers are only partially insured against unemployment. One reason is that high unemployment compensation creates a free rider problem when monitoring of job search behavior is limited; people who do not seek employment (non-workers) may nevertheless collect unemployment compensation. We...

We investigate a simultaneous discrete public good provision game with incomplete information. To use the terminology of Admati and Perry (1991), we consider both contribution and subscription games. In the former, contributions are not refunded if the project is not completed, while in the...

We consider a standard insurance economy where consumers are supposed to vote over menus of insurance contracts: A menu of contracts is majority stable if there does not exist another menu which is supported by an appropriate majority of consumers. We compute the smallest level of super majority...

We formulate a general theory of decision making based on a lattice of observable events, and we exhibit a large class of representations called the general model. Some of the representations are equivalent to the so called standard model in which observable events are modelled by an algebra of...

Two agents negotiate, according to the Nash bargaining solution, over the allocation of a single (divisible) commodity (or multiple commodities with fixed ordinal preferences). It has been shown that in this situation agents find dominant to report their least risk averse utility functions. This...

We formulate a new theory of expected utility under uncertainty based on the notion of an event-lattice, which is a natural generalization of a Savage state space. The modelling of uncertainty is based on the idea that the decision maker for each group of related decisions to be taken creates a...

In a strategic environment, when a player's information acquisition is observable to others, it may strictly decrease the player's resulting equilibrium payoff even if information acquisition itself is costless. This phenomenon has previously been known by a number of examples. This paper shows...