The transferable utility hypothesis underlies important theoretical results in household economics. We provide a revealed preference framework for bringing this (theoretically appealing) hypothesis to observational data. We establish revealed preference conditions that must be satisfied for...

Modern economies rely heavily on their infrastructure networks. These networks face threats ranging from natural disasters to human attacks. As networks are pervasive, the investments needed to protect them are very large; this motivates the study of targeted defense. What are the 'key' nodes to...

We study the degree of falsifiability of theories of choice. A theory is easy to falsify if relatively small datasets are enough to guarantee that the theory can be falsified: the VC dimension of a theory is the largest sample size for which the theory is ''never falsifiable.'' VC dimension is...

While many theoretical works, particularly in Family Economics, rely on the Transferable Utility (TU) assumption, its exact implications in terms of individual preferences have never been fully worked out. In this paper, we provide a set of necessary and sufficient conditions for a group to...

The transferable utility hypothesis underlies important theoretical results in household economics. We provide a revealed preference framework for bringing this (theoretically appealing) hypothesis to observational data. We establish revealed preference conditions that must be satisfied for...

We develop a theory of stability in many-to-many matching markets. We give conditions under which the setwise-stable set, a core-like concept, is nonempty and can be approached through an algorithm. The usual core may be empty. The setwise-stable set coincides with the pairwise-stable set and...

A key to the Coase conjecture is the monopolist's inability to commit to a price, which leads consumers to believe that a high current price will be followed by low future prices. This paper studies the robustness of the Coase conjecture with respect to these beliefs of consumers. In particular,...

This paper formally examines two competing methods of conducting a lottery in assigning students to schools, motivated by the design of the centralized high school student assignment system in New York City. The main result of the paper is that a single and multiple lottery mechanism are...

We consider Bayesian incentive-compatible mechanisms with independent types and either private values or interdependent values that satisfy a form of "congruence." We show that in these settings, interim participation constraints are satisfied when the status quo is the randomized allocation...

In a matching problem between students and schools, a mechanism is said to be robustly stable if it is stable, strategy-proof, and immune to a combined manipulation, where a student first misreports her preferences and then blocks the matching that is produced by the mechanism. We find that even...