Information and Risk in the Medieval Doctrine of Usury during the Thirteenth Century

The few pages that Adam Smith devoted to lotteries, mainly in the Wealth of Nations (1776) did not receive much attention. They nonetheless constituted an opportunity to introduce a sophisticated analysis of individual decision under risk. Through various examples, Smith pointed out a...

This paper provides a general framework for a unifying treatment of stochastic dominance of any degree and of any type (direct or inverse for each final or intermediary level). It gives the conditions for the congruence between stochastic dominance and classes of utility functions in this...