Machina & Schmeidler (1992) show that probabilistic sophistication can be obtained in a Savage setting without imposing expected utility by dropping Savage's axiom P2 (sure-thing principle) and strengthening his axiom P4 (weak comparative probability). Their stronger axiom, however, embodies a...

Simon Grant and John Quiggin argue that taking the equity premium seriously---the well-known fact that the average annual historical return of stocks is seven times that of government bonds and other debt---has many implications, the most robust of which is that recessions are extremely costly...

In strictly competitive games, equilibrium mixed strategies are invariant to changes in the ultimate prizes. Dixit and Skeath argue that this seems counter-intuitive, and it is a challenge to the expected utility theory. We show that this invariance is robust to dropping the independence axiom,...

The idea of representing choice under uncertainty as a trade-off between mean returns and some measure of risk or uncertainty is fundamental to the analysis of investment decisions. In this paper, we show that preferences can be characterized in this way, even in the absence of objective...

We provide an axiomatization of an additively separable social welfare function in the context of Harsanyi’s impartial observer theorem. To do this, we reformulate Harsanyi’s setting to make the lotteries over the identities the observer may assume independent of the social alternative....

We focus on aspects of differential awareness that give rise to contractual disputes. Parties to a contract are boundedly rational as the state space available to them is coarser than the complete state space. Hence, they may disagree as to which state of the world has occurred, and therefore as...