December 1998 <p> How does the economy react to the arrival of a new major technology? The existing literature on General Purpose Technologies (GPTs) has studied the role that mechanisms like secondary innovations, diffusion, and learning by firms play in the adjustment process. By contrast, we...</p>

December 1999 <p> This papers develops a theory of intergenerational exchange for generations that are either selfish or have non-dynastic altruism. The main building blocks of the theory are forward and backward intergenerational goods (FIGs and BIGs) and the relationship between them. A FIG is a...</p>

Are market and voting institutions capable of producing optimal intergenerational risk-sharing? To study this question, we consider a simple endowment economy with uncertainty and overlapping generations. Endowments are stochastic; thus it is possible to increase the welfare of every generation...

How do we make decisions when confronted with several alternatives (e.g., on a supermarket shelf)? Previous work has shown that accumulator models, such as the drift-diffusion model, can provide accurate descriptions of the psychometric data for binary value-based choices, and that the choice...

This paper has two goals. First, we discuss several emerging approaches to applied welfare analysis under non-standard (“behavioral”) assumptions concerning consumer choice. This provides a foundation for Behavioral Public Economics. Second, we illustrate applications of these approaches by...

We investigate the feasibility of inferring the choices people would make (if given the opportunity) based on their neural responses to the pertinent prospects when they are not engaged in actual decision making. The ability to make such inferences is of potential value when choice data are...

We examine democratic policy-making in a simple institution with real-time agenda setting. Individuals are recognized sequentially. Once recognized, an individual makes a proposal, which is immediately put to a vote. If a proposal passes, it supercedes all previously passed proposals. The policy...

We use a simple graphical approach to represent Social Welfare Functions that satisfy Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives and Anonymity. This approach allows us to provide simple and illustrative proofs of May's Theorem, of variants of classic impossibility results, and of a recent result on...