We define a behavioral concept of relevance in the context of decision making under uncertainty.  We argue that this concept provides a sensible answer to the question "What probabilistic environments do an individuals' preferences reveal as mattering to her decisions?" under a symmetry...

We axiomatize preferences that can be represented by a monotonic aggregation of subjective expected utilities generated by a utility function and some set of i.i.d. probability measures over a product state space, S1. For such preferences, we define relevant measures, show that they are treated...

This paper investigates the factors that shaped Kenyan's voting intentions in the 2007 presidential election.  Using data from a public opinion survey conducted two weeks before the election we are able to evaluate the relative importance of what shaped voting behavior comprehensively, taking...

The exchange between Epstein (2010) and Klibanoff et al. (2012) identified a behavioral issue that sharply distinguishes between two classes of models of ambiguity sensitivity, exemplified by the Î±-MEU model and the smooth ambiguity model, respectively. The issue in question is whether a...

A theory of decision making is proposed that supplies an axiomatic basis for the concept of satisficing postulated by Herbert Simon. After a detailed review of classical results that characterize several varieties of preference-maximizing choice behavior, the axiomatization proceeds by weakening...

We provide a simple necessary and sufficient condition for when a multiproduct demand system can be generated from a discrete choice model with unit demands.

The paper uses an appropriate survey from rural China to answer the question: Is happiness infectious, i.e. does the happiness of an individual depend positively on the happiness of their reference group?  The evidence is consistent with this hypothesis, but the challenge is to solve the...

In the workhorse  model of welfare economics, the elasticity of marginal utility, often denoted as η, serves simultaneously to represent aversion to risk, aversion to spatial inequality, and preferences for intertemporal substitution.  While Kreps-Porteus-Selden and Epstein-Zin preferences...

We investigate what it means for one act to be more ambiguous than another. The question is evidently analogous to asking what makes one prospect riskier than another, but beliefs are neither objective nor representable by a unique probability. Our starting point is an abstract class of...

We examine a variety of preference-based definitions of ambiguous events in the context of the smooth ambiguity model.  We first consider the definition proposed in Klibanoff, Marinacci, and Mukerji (2005) based on the classic Ellsberg two-urn paradox (Ellsberg (1961)), and show that it...