The precautionary principle (PP) applied to environmental policy stipulates that, in the presence of physical uncertainty, society must take robust preventive action to guard against worst-case outcomes. It follows that the higher the degree of uncertainty, the more aggressive this preventive...

We present a tractable model of the effects of nonfinancial risk on intertemporal choice. Our purpose is to provide a simple framework that can be adopted in fields like representative-agent macroeconomics, corporate finance, or political economy, where most modelers have chosen not to...

Heterogeneous beliefs among market participants can lead to questionable speculative trading that goes beyond any risk-sharing motives. We demonstrate that such unwarranted betting behavior in market equilibrium can be mitigated by introducing nonlinear pricing for ambiguous contracts, without...

The precautionary principle (PP) applied to environmental policy stipulates that, in the presence of physical uncertainty, society must take robust preventive action to guard against worst-case outcomes. It follows that the higher the degree of uncertainty, the more aggressive this preventive...

This paper investigates a novel behavioral feature exhibited by recursive preferences: aversion to risks that are persistent through time. I introduce a formal notion of correlation aversion to capture this phenomenon and provide a characterization based on risk attitudes. Furthermore,...

This paper studies the issue of coordinating equipment maintenance operations with capital investment strategy in the presence of random equipment failures. This problem represents an important extension of the celebrated Kamien and Schwartz (KS) paper published in Management Science. The...

Initiating a conflict is an investment in social, political or economic change. The decision to attack is sequential in time, irreversible and, more important, includes highly uncertain and erratic threats and opportunities yet completely disregarded in conflict theory. In this dynamic model of...

The interest shown by policy makers and economists in the precautionary principle indicates the importance of model uncertainty in global warming policy. I show that through robust control, policy makers can implement the precautionary principle to regulate a stock pollutant, and I analyze its...

This note examines the stability of an optimal control problem based on a particular stochastic extension of the Nerlove-Arrow advertising model. It is shown that depending on the parameters of the problem and the initial conditions, the optimal solution may converge monotonically or...

This paper develops an multi-state optimizing model of individual labor supply that concentrates on all-or-nothing employment decisions. This model views individual behavior in the labor market as a process of moving between labor force activities (employed, unemployed, and...