Anticipating the impact of changes in economic incentives on dietary quality and nutritional health requires knowledge of how physical quantities of food consumed respond to price and income variations. A problem arises, however, because physical quantities are: 1- not consistent aggregates in...

There are many situations in which individuals have a choice of whether or not to observe the eventual outcome. In these instances, individuals often prefer to avoid observing the outcome. The standard von Neumann-Morgenstern (vNM) Expected Utility model cannot accommodate these cases, since it...

This dissertation addresses a basic difficulty in accommodating other-regarding preferences within existing models of decision making. Decision makers with such preferences may violate the property of stochastic dominance that is shared by both expected utility and almost any model of...

This dissertation consists of three essays concerning entrepreneurship, venture capital and monetary economics. It takes time for a venture capitalist to find a project in which to invest, to implement projects and to cash out. Further, capitalists and entrepreneurs are uncertain about whom they...

The dissertation consists of four chapters. The first chapter presents a model that incorporates product market competition into the standard neoclassical framework. The model explains why value-maximizing firms conduct mergers that appear to lower shareholder value. In a Cournot setting, the...

This dissertation considers the determinants of individual careers within firms and it is articulated into two chapters. The first chapter analyzes a learning model in which a firm and a worker can acquire information about the worker's ability by observing his performance at different tasks....

Most discrete time literature uses the beta that results from a regression of an asset's simple returns on various factors to quantify risk. The departing point for this thesis is the consistent use of log-returns. When log-returns are considered, the relevant measure of systematic risk becomes...

Game theoretic modeling involves making assumptions on agents' infinite hierarchies of beliefs. These assumptions are understood to be only approximately satisfied in the actual situation. Thus, the significance of game theoretic predictions depend on robustness properties of the solution...

A novel survey dataset on computed tomography (CT) machine acquisition is used to explore which theories best answer two questions from the decision making literature. First, what determines how much uncertainty a firm has when investing in updated technology? Second, what determines the value...