An information transaction entails the purchase of information. Formally, it consists of an information structure together with a price. We develop an index of the appeal of information transactions, which is derived as a dual to the agent's preferences for information. The index of information...

Define the riskiness of a gamble as the reciprocal of the absolute risk aversion (ARA) of an individual with constant ARA who is indifferent between taking and not taking that gamble. We characterize this index by axioms, chief among them a “duality” axiom which, roughly speaking, asserts...

Consider any investor who fears ruin facing any set of investments that satisfy no-arbitrage. Before investing, he can purchase information about the state of nature in the form of an information structure. Given his prior, information structure 'a' is more informative than information structure...

The role of first principles in economics is examined through the lens of dominant methodological approaches of the classical and neoclassical periods. First principles are most clearly displayed in pure deductive systems. The tension between first principles as the basis for deductivist...

There is a fundamental difference between the natural and the social sciences due to reactivity. This difference remains even in the age of Artificially Intelligent Learning Machines and Big Data. Many academic economists take it as a matter of course that economics should become a natural...

There is a fundamental difference between the natural and the social sciences due to reactivity. This difference remains even in the age of Artificially Intelligent Learning Machines and Big Data. Many academic economists take it as a matter of course that economics should become a natural...

This paper derives a representation of preferences for a choice theory with vague environments; vague in the sense that the agent does not know the precise lotteries over outcomes conditional on states. Instead, he knows only a possible set of these lotteries for each state. Thus, this paper's...

Many economic decisions involve a substantial amount of uncertainty, and therefore crucially depend on how individuals process probabilistic information. In this paper, we investigate the capability for probability judgment in a representative sample of the German population. Our results show...

We propose and axiomatically characterize a representation of ambiguity sensitive preferences. The distinguishing feature of our axiomatization is that we do not require preferences to be event-wise separable over any domain of acts. Even without any such separability restrictions, we are able...

We study Aumann and Serrano's (2008) risk index for sums of gambles that are not dependent. If the dependent parts are similarly ordered, then the risk index of the sum is always larger than the minimum of the risk indices of the two gambles. For negative dependence, the risk index of the sum is...