We model adoption and diffusion in a commons under uncertainty about a technology’s value. Technological resource stock externalities make technology less valuable with depleted stocks, but transmit information about a new technology’s value, causing faster adoption of high-value technologies.

This paper identifies a new sufficient condition for a prudent agent to have positive precautionary saving in the presence of labor income and interest rate risks of any size. We also provide three economic interpretations for this condition focusing respectively on the marginal effect of saving...

A linkage to reconcile measurable utility derived from intensity comparisons or from probability mixtures is provided in this note. This brief note is in honor of Lloyd Shapley whose relatively unknown seminal paper on measurable utility from axioms involving the fineness of perception offered a...

We study multivariate prevention decisions by disentangling early and late prevention. We show how the modularity of prevention and several measures of prevention efficiency interact with the agent’s risk attitude. We derive comparative statics with respect to impatience, loss severity, and...

Entry decisions in market entry games usually depend on the belief about how many others are entering the market, the belief about the own rank in a real effort task, and subjects’ risk preferences. In this paper I am able to replicate these basic results and examine two further dimensions:...

This paper provides evidence of a negative association between macroeconomic uncertainty and the cross sectional dispersion of investment rate for a panel of Japanese manufacturing firms. We show that an increase in uncertainty leads to the narrowing of the cross section dispersion of investment...

This note provides an alternative derivation of the leximin principle using the framework of Harsanyi’s (1953) equi-probability model. We demonstrate that the leximin principle is concluded if and only if the preference ordering of the impartial observer obeys strong monotonicity and complete...

We observe that identification of the discount rate from experimental data requires an assumption about the consumption period, the length of time over which a payment will be turned into utility-providing consumption. We show that the optimal consumption period is substantially longer than...

We conduct a field experiment with low-income subjects in Dallas, Texas. We examine voluntary, informal risk sharing using a visual representation of the solidarity game developed for low-literacy populations. We find substantially more ‘fixed gift to loser’ behavior and less...

The utility premium is generally defined as the pain or reduction in expected utility caused by an nth-degree risk increase, where n≥2. While it is a very useful concept in understanding a decision maker’s choice in uncertain situations, the utility premium is not interpersonally comparable....