This paper describes conditions under which one investment project dominates a second project in terms of net present value, irrespective of the choice of the discount rate. The resulting partial ordering of projects has certain similarities to stochastic dominance. However, the structure of the...

Gravity model explanations of trade volumes frequently include dummy variables to account for the commonality of language among trading partners. In this paper we use a data set for the number of people in a country who speak English as a first language or English as a second language (Crystal,...

We examine the interplay of imperfect competition and incomplete information in the context of price competition among firms producing horizontally- and vertically-differentiated substitute products. We find that incomplete information about vertical quality (e.g., consumer satisfaction) that is...

Serge Kolm's "epistemic counterfactual principle" says that a social choice only needs to be made from the actual feasible set of alternatives given the actual preference profile, but it must be justified by the choices that would have been made in appropriate counterfactual choice situations....

This paper studies the empirical relevance of temptation and self-control using household-level data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey. We construct an infinite-horizon consumption-savings model that allows, but does not require, temptation and self-control in preferences. To distinguish...

This article reconsiders the Harsanyi--Sen debate concerning whether Harsanyi is justified in interpreting his Aggregation and Impartial Observer Theorems as providing axiomatizations of utilitarianism. Sen's criticism and its formalization by Weymark are based on the claim that von...

In this paper, we decompose the variance of logarithmic monthly earnings of prime age males into its permanent and transitory components, using a five-wave rotating panel from the Venezuelan "Encuesta de Hogares por Muestreo" from 1995 to 1997. As far as we know, this is the first time a...

This article considers the ranking of profiles of opportunity sets on the basis of their equality. A version of the Pigou-Dalton transfer principle that is appropriate for the measurement of opportunity inequality is introduced and used to axiomatize the class of generalized Gini equality of...

We add congestion/snobbery to the Hotelling model of spatial competition. For any firm locations on opposite sides of the midpoint, a pure strategy price equilibrium exists and is unique if congestion costs are strong enough relative to transportation costs. The maximum distance between firms in...

We build a model consisting of a borrowing firm, a lending institution (bank), and a third party influencing loan decision-making (auditor/government regulator) where a low-type firm can bribe the auditor to file an untruthful report about its true type so as to obtain a loan from the bank to...