This paper contributes to an important recent debate around expected utility and risk aversion. Rejecting a gamble over a given range of wealth levels imposes a lower bound on risk aversion. Using this lower bound and empirical evidence on the range of the risk aversion coefficient, we calibrate...

In an extremely interesting paper, Palacios-Huerta and Volij (2004) [PV] introduce the axiomatic method to the problem of how to rank academic journals on the basis of their mutual citations. They characterize the invariant method as the only one satisfying a list of five appealing properties....

We provide a characterization of virtual Bayesian implementation in pure strategies for environments satisfying no-total-indifference. A social choice function in such environments is virtually Bayesian implementable if and only if it satisfies incentive compatibility and a condition we term...

In an exchange economy with a finite number of indivisible goods, we analyze a dynamic trading process of coalitional recontracting where agents may make mistakes with small probability. We show first that the recurrent classes of the unperturbed (mistake free) process consist of (i) all core...

We study decentralized trade processes in general exchange economies and house allocation problems with and without money. Such processes are subject to persistent random shocks stemming from agents’ maximization of random utility. By imposing structure on the utility noise term —logit...

A core allocation of a complete information economy can be characterized as one that would not be unanimously rejected in favor of another feasible alternative by any coalition. We use this test of coalitional voting in an incomplete information environment to formalize a notion of resilience....

We study a strategic model of dynamic trading where agents are asymmetrically informed over common value sources of uncertainty. There is a continuum of uninformed buyers and a finite number of sellers, some of them informed. When there is only one seller, full information revelation never...

Suppose that the goals of a society can be summarized in a social choice rule, i.e., a mapping from relevant underlying parameters to final outcomes. Typically, the underlying parameters (e.g., individual preferences) are private information to the agents in society. The implementation problem...

Watson (2002) proposes non-forcing contracts as a way to show the limitations of the mechanism design program with ex-post renegotiation (Maskin and Moore (1999)). If one takes a partial implementation approach, as Watson does, we show that non-forcing contracts do not constitute an intermediate...