Unintended consequences manifest themselves in many aspects of socioeconomic life. We develop a model of unintended consequences (UC) of novel policies. In our setup, the policymaker is unaware of the UC of her policy. We discuss several approaches to evaluating policy in terms of welfare...

We study the effect of ambiguity on timing decisions. An agent faces a stopping problem with an uncertain stopping payoff and a stochastic time limit. The agent is unsure about the correct model quantifying the uncertainty and seeks to maximize her payoff guarantee over a set of plausible...

The goal programming (GP) is a well-known approach applied to multi-criteria decision making (M-DM). It has been used in many domains and the literature offers diverse extensions of this procedure. On the other hand, so far, some evident analogies between M-DM under certainty and scenario-based...

This paper studies sequential information acquisition by an ambiguity-averse decision maker (DM), who decides how long to collect information before taking an irreversible action. The agent optimizes against the worst-case belief and updates prior by prior. We show that the consideration of...

There are many reasons to suspect that benefit-cost analysis applied to environmental policies will result in policy decisions that will reject those environmental policies. The important question, of course, is whether those rejections are based on proper science. The present paper explores...

We address the problem of choosing a portfolio of policies under "deep uncertainty." We introduce the idea of belief dominance as a way to derive a set of non-dominated portfolios and robust individual alternatives. Our approach departs from the tradition of providing a single recommended...

We introduce a Downsian model in which policy-relevant information is revealed to the elected politician after the election. The electorate benefits from giving the elected politician some discretion to adapt policies to his information. But limits on discretion are desirable when politicians do...

This paper examines the process of economic policy-making under conditions of model uncertainty. A median voter model is introduced in which the electorate is uncertain of the policy measures available as well as their respective outcomes and opinion formation is a social process of...

How should a decision-maker allocate R&D funds when a group of experts provides divergent estimates on a technology's potential effectiveness? To address this question, we propose a simple decision-theoretic framework that takes into account ambiguity over the aggregation of expert opinion and a...

We derive a general formula for the time decay, theta, for out-of-the-money European options on stocks and bonds at expiry, in terms of the density of jumps and payoff. Explicit formulas are derived for the standard put and call options, exchange options in stochastic volatility and local...