An adverse selection model of firm reputation is developed in which short-lived clients purchase services from firms operated by overlapping generations of agents. A firm's only asset is its name, or reputation, and trade of names is not observed by clients. As a result, names are traded in all...

For perfectly competitive economies under uncertainty, there is a well-known equivalence between a formulation with contingent goods and one with state-specific securities followed by spot markets for goods. In this paper, I examine whether this equivalence carries over to a particular form of...

Evidence is adduced that the sages of the ancient Babylonian Talmud, as well as some of the medieval commentators thereon, were well aware of sophisticated concepts of modern theories of risk-bearing. Copyright Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003

In an oligopoly game with cost uncertainty and risk averse firms, we show that Bertrand and Cournot equilibrium have different convergence properties when the market is replicated. The Cournot equilibrium price converges to the competitive price. Under very typical and somewhat general...

In this paper we fully characterize an individual's choice behaviour according to three different so-called external references. The first system which we describe axiomatically is standard utility maximization or preference optimization. The second approach characterizes the choice of the...

Suppose a large economy with individual risk is modeled by a continuum of pairwise exchangeable random variables (i.i.d., in particular). Then the relevant stochastic process is jointly measurable only in degenerate cases. Yet in Monte Carlo simulation, the average of a large finite draw of the...

Starr (1973) showed that, if people have different subjective probabilities, ex ante and ex post efficiency conflict. Conversely, under the simple preferences that he considered, the discrepancy between ex ante and ex post efficiency disappears when subjective probabilities are identical. Here I...

In this paper I analyze the general equilibrium in a random Walrasian economy. Dependence among agents is introduced in the form of dependency neighborhoods. Under the uncertainty, an agent may fail to survive due to a meager endowment in a particular state (direct effect), as well as due to...

This paper explores sufficient conditions for a continuous stationary Markov optimal policy and a concave value function in stochastic dynamic programming problems. Also, the paper addresses conditions needed for the differentiability of the value function. The paper uses conditions such as...

This paper obtains finite analogues to propositions that a previous literature obtained about the informational efficiency of mechanisms whose possible messages form a continuum. Upon reaching an equilibrium message, to which all persons “agree”, a mechanism obtains an action appropriate to...