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...

We argue that a precedent is important not only because it changes the relative frequency of a certain event, making it positive rather than zero, but also because it changes the way that relative frequencies are weighed. Specifically, agents assess probabilities of future events based on past...

We argue that a precedent is important not only because it changes the relative frequency of a certain event, making it positive rather than zero, but also because it changes the way that relative frequencies are weighed. Specifically, agents assess probabilities of future events based on past...

Agents make predictions based on similar past cases, while also learning the relative importance of various attributes in judging similarity. We ask whether the resulting "empirical similarity" is unique, and how easy it is to find it. We show that with many observations and few relevant...

Agents make predictions based on similar past cases. The notion of similarity is itself learnt from experience by "second-order induction": past cases inform agents also about the relative importance of various attributes in judging similarity. However, there may be multiple "optimal" similarity...