This paper finds necessary and sufficient conditions of Nth-order stochastic dominance (SD) for risk aversion and develops linear tests for Nth-order SD. We introduce a linear FDSD (fourth-order SD and decreasing absolute risk aversion SD) test for standard risk aversion. A positive research...

We prove that a preference relation which is continuous on every straight line has a utility representation if its domain is a convex subset of a finite dimensional vector space. Our condition on the domain of a preference relation is stronger than Eilenberg (1941) and Debreu (1959, 1964), but...

We provide characterizations of preferences representable by a Cobb-Douglas utility function.

In most economics textbooks there is a gap between the non-existence of utility functions and the existence of continuous utility functions, although upper semi-continuity is sufficient for many purposes. Starting from a simple constructive approach for countable domains and combining this with...

A seminal theorem due to Blackwell (1951) shows that every Bayesian decision-maker prefers an informative signal Y to another signal X if and only if Y is statistically sufficient for X. Sufficiency is an unduly strong requirement in most economic problems because it does not incorporate any...

We consider preference relations over information that are monotone: more information is preferred to less. We prove that, if a preference relation on information about an uncountable set of states of nature is monotone, then it is not representable by a utility function

This paper shows that frequently observed violations of IIA (Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives), namely the similarity and attraction effect can be compatible with the maximization of rational preferences and the violations themselves can be used to infer the underlying rational preference...

It is frequently assumed in several domains of economics that demand functions are invertible in prices. At the primitive level of preferences, however, the characterization of such demand functions remains elusive. We identify conditions on a utility-maximizing consumer's preferences that are...

The authors study the lack of necessity of the transitivity property when representing preference relations. Avoiding transitivity hypothesis, this work offers a vision about the modeling of consumer preference relations which are different from the classic one used in economics pedagogy. The...