Orderings of interdependence among random variables are useful in many economic contexts, for example, in assessing ex post inequality under uncertainty; in comparing multidimensional inequality; in valuing portfolios of assets or insurance policies; and in assessing systemic risk. We explore...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greaterinterdependence. One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...

This paper argues that, to be forward-looking in a logically consistent sense, a decision maker must take account of his overall well-being, not just his instantaneous utility, in all future periods. However, such a decision-maker is necessarily time inconsistent. The paper explores the...

Cooperative concepts of renegotiation in repeated games have typically assumed that Pareto-ranked equilibria could not coexist within the same renegotiation-proof set. With explicit renegotiation, however, a proposal to move to a Pareto-superior equilibrium can be deterred by a different...

We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...

A frequently heard explanation for the underdeveloped metro system in Rome is the following one: If we tried to build a new metro line, it would probably be stopped by archeological finds that are too valuable to destroy, so the investment would be wasted. This statement, which seems...

In dynamic models driven by diffusion processes, the smoothness of the value function plays a crucial role for characterizing properties of the solution. However, available methods to ensure such smoothness have limited applicability in economics, and economists have often relied on either...

How does renegotiation affect contracts between a principal and an agent subject to persistent private information and moral hazard? This paper introduces a concept of renegotiation-proofness, which adapts to stochastic games the concepts of weak renegotiation-proofness and internal consistency...