This paper introduces the concept of firm belief, which is proposed as a new epistemic model for a wide class of preferences. In particular, firm beliefs are shown to have the following desirable properties: (i) they are derived from preferences according to a plausible rule of epistemic...

A well-known result in the medical insurance literature is that zero co-insurance is never second-best for insurance contracts subject to moral hazard. We replace the usual expected utility assumption with a version of the rank-dependent utility (RDU) model that has greater experimental support....

We extend the Coase conjecture to the case of a seller with a single object, who faces n potential buyers and holds a sequence of English auctions until the object is sold. In an independent-private-values environment in which buyers and sellers share the same discount factor, we show that the...

Subjective expected utility (SEU) theory is ubiquitous in models of economic environments involving uncertainty. Part of its appeal is its elegant axiomatization by Anscombe and Aumann, whose representation theorem uses little more than the simple geometry of expected utility. Nevertheless, the...

The indirect utility principle provides an instrumentalist basis for ranking opportunity sets, given an underlying preference ranking on alternatives. Opportunity set A is weakly preferred to B if A includes at least one preference-maximising element from <InlineEquation ID="IEq1"> <EquationSource Format="TEX">$$A\cup B$$</EquationSource> </InlineEquation>. We introduce the Plott...</equationsource></inlineequation>

An investment bubble is a period of excessive, and predictably unpro…table, investment(DeMarzo, Kaniel and Kremer, 2007, p.737). Such bubbles most often accompany the arrival of some new technology, such as the tech stock boom and bust of the late 1990s and early 2000s. We provide a rational...