It is shown how to test revealed preference data on choices under uncertainty for consistency with first and second order stochastic dominance (FSD or SSD). The axiom derived for SSD is a necessary and sufficient condition for risk aversion. If an investor is risk averse, stochastic dominance...

A nonparametric approach is presented to test whether decisions on a probability simplex could be induced by quasiconcave preferences. Necessary and sufficient conditions are presented. If the answer is affirmative, the methods developed here allow to reconstruct bounds on indifference curves....

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...

This paper presents a method to assess the distribution of values of time, and values of statistical life, over participants to a stated choice experiment, that does not require the researcher to make an a priori assumption on the type of distribution, as is required for example for mixed logit...

We study the Medicare Part D prescription drug insurance program as a bellwether for designs of private, non-mandatory health insurance markets that control adverse selection and assure adequate access and coverage. The focus of this paper is on the ability of consumers to evaluate and optimize...

Modern consumer theories are built upon the premise of the forward looking behavior of households. While most of the empirical studies at micro level are based on Euler equation, there have been few to estimate the household consumption function and test the implication of forward looking...

We analyze a clear-cut example of choice under uncertainty, namely deductible choice in the Dutch health insurance market. The unique institutional features of this market enable us to examine demand-side choices that only vary in their financial parameters. Using a rich dataset, we investigate...

We study physicians' prescription choices when uncertainty about drug efficacy is resolved through two channels: firms' marketing activities (e.g., detailing) and patients' experiences with the drugs. We first provide empirical evidence that suggests the well-understood information incentive for...

Depending on the shopping context, consumers may develop different mental representations of complex shopping trip decision problems to help them interpret the decision situation that they face and evaluate alternative courses of action. To investigate these mental representations and how they...

Text is inherently ambiguous. I use textual analysis to extract beliefs from financial news and social media sources to construct a Big Data ambiguity index. The index uses mixture of distributions that regards disagreement between sources and their individual uncertainties. Empirical results...