In a recent research paper, health economists David Cutler and Adriana Lleras-Muney analyze data primarily from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), an annual cross-sectional household survey administered by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) at the Centers for Disease...

If A is better than B and B is better than C, then A is better than C, right? Larry Temkin and Stuart Rachels say: No! Betterness is nontransitive, they claim. In this paper, I discuss the central type of argument advanced by Temkin and Rachels for this radical idea, and argue that, given this...

This paper analyzes increased risk aversion in the presence of two risks. Necessary and sufficient conditions for increased risk aversion across the domain of the foreground risk are found for changes in both the foreground and background risks. Preferences that satisfy the necessary and...

Following Kreps (1979), we consider a decision maker with uncertain beliefs about her own future taste. This uncertainty leaves the decision maker with preference for flexibility: When choosing among menus containing alternatives for future choice, she weakly prefers larger menus. Existing...

This article analyzes the effect of speculation on the economic welfare from various criteria, using a simple Edgeworth box within a three-period Walrasian competition framework. Here “speculation” is defined as a series of transition processes of each agent’s spontaneous production of...

This essay provides an elementary, unified introduction to resource allocation under uncertainty in competitive markets. The coverage includes decision-making under uncertainty, measuring risk and risk aversion, insurance and asset markets, and asymmetric information.

Information and communication technologies are one of the most pervasive technologies in the world, second only to 'human intelligence' or the human brain. Thus, understanding the factors that determine the diffusion of new technologies across african countries is important to understanding the...