In light of the interest in axiomatic models of decision making in recent years, one is led to ask, in what ways do the axiomatic deriva- tions advance economics? If economists are interested in predicting how people behave, without a pretense to change individual decision making, how can they...

We consider a decision maker who follows a status quo without reconsidering her implicit decision at every period. Only as a result of certain events will she ask herself whether she would like to change her choice. We ask when this mode of decision making is compatible with optimality. We state...

We provide a microfoundation for a weighted utilitarian social welfare function that reflects common moral intuitions about interpersonal comparisons of utilities. If utility is only ordinal, interpersonal comparisons are meaningless. Nonetheless, economics often adopts utilitarian welfare...