It is not infrequent to see studies of imperfect competition or of industrial organization rest upon questionable foundations such as the hypothesis that inverse market demand is, whenever it is positive, concave or even linear. Assumptions of this sort are not robust (i.e., "additive") in the...

We provide theoretical foundations for several common (nested) representations of intrinsic linear habit formation. Our axiomatization introduces an intertemporal theory of weaning a decision-maker from her habits using the device of compensation. We clarify differences across specifications of...

The discounted-utilitarian social welfare function (DU) is used by the great majority of researchers studying intergenerational resource allocation in the presence of climate change (e.g., W. Nordhaus, M. Weitzman, N. Stern, and P. Dasgupta). I present three justifications for using DU: (1) the...

We model an intergenerational society, with a representative agent at each date, who must deplete a renewable resource, from which he derives utility, to produce consumption goods. We adopt the intergenerational lexicographic minimum as the social welfare function. Initially, technological...

We provide theoretical foundations for several common (nested) representations of intrinsic linear habit formation. These representations are dynamically consistent and additive, with geometrically decaying coefficients of habit formation. Our axiomatization introduces a revealed preference...

Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. But are these biases learned or innate? We investigate this question using experiments on a novel set of subjects — capuchin monkeys. By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin...

A predictor is asked to rank eventualities according to their plausibility, based on past cases. We assume that she can form a ranking given any memory that consists of finitely many past cases. Mild consistency requirements on these rankings imply that they have a numerical representation via a...

We describe conditions for the existence of a stationary Markovian equilibrium when total production or total endowment is a random variable. Apart from regularity assumptions, there are two crucial conditions: (i) low information -- agents are ignorant of both total endowment and their own...

Savage (1954) provided a set of axioms on preferences over acts that were equivalent to the existence of an expected utility representation. We show that in addition to this representation, there is a continuum of other "expected utility" representations in which for any act, the probability...

Prediction is based on past cases. We assume that a predictor can rank eventualities according to their plausibility given any memory that consists of repetitions of past cases. In a companion paper, we show that under mild consistency requirements, these rankings can be represented by numerical...