Duesenberry introduced the notion of a ratchet investor who does not tolerate any decline in her consumption rate. We connect the demand behavior of such an agent to the behavior of standard time-additive agents. A ratchet investor demands the running maximum of the optimal plan a conventional...

Experimental evidence stresses the importance of so-called social preferences for understanding economic behavior. Social preferences are defined over the entire allocation in a given economic environment, and not just over one's own consumption as is traditionally presumed. We study the...

We combine general equilibrium theory and théorie générale of stochastic processes to derive structural results about equilibrium state prices.

We study a communication game of common interest in which the sender observes one of infinite types and sends one of finite messages which is interpreted by the receiver. In equilibrium there is no full separation but types are clustered into convex categories. We give a full characterization of...

This paper studies the evolutionary stability of the unique Nash equilibrium of a first price sealed bid auction. It is shown that the Nash equilibrium is not asymptotically stable under payoff monotonic dynamics for arbitrary initial populations. In contrast, when the initial population...

We develop a theory of optimal stopping problems under ambiguity in continuous time. Using results from (backward) stochastic calculus, we characterize the value function as the smallest (nonlinear) supermartingale dominating the payoff process. For Markovian models, we derive an adjusted...

We model and solve Best Choice Problems in the multiple prior framework: An ambiguity averse decision maker aims to choose the best among a fixed number of applicants that appear sequentially in a random order. The decision faces ambiguity about the probability that a candidate - a relatively...

We consider optimal stopping problems for ambiguity averse decision makers with multiple priors. In general, backward induction fails. If, however, the class of priors is time-consistent, we establish a generalization of the classical theory of optimal stopping. To this end, we develop first...