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...

The Precautionary Principle has been proposed as a basis for making decisions about environmental issues but remains controversial. Using a model of inductively justified propositions about awareness, this paper shows how the Precautionary Principle may be interpreted as a heuristic guide for...

Savage motivated his Sure-Thing Principle b y arguing that, whenever an act would be preferred if an event obtains and preferred if an event did not obtain, then it should be preferred overall. The idea that it should be possible to decompose and recompose decision problems in this way has...