In the United States and most industrialized countries, regulatory policies and decision-making pertaining to food safety, occupational health and environmental protection are science-based. The actual pace and complexity of technological innovation, however, make it increasingly necessary to...

We use a real option approach to determine optimally when a social planner has to stop or resume logging in situations where an endangered species relies on forest habitat for its survival, and that habitat evolves stochastically. The model incorporates economic, ecological and social features,...

This paper provides the first study on the impact of noise barriers on the price of adjacent houses based on a repeat sale analysis (RSA), arguably the best methodology to address this question. Essentially, a repeat sale analysis examines the differential between the prices of houses sold...

In this paper we analyze a long-term risk-sharing contract between two risk-averse agents facing self-enforcing constraints. We enlarge the contracting space to allow for an ex ante transfer (at the beginning of the period) before the state of nature is realized. We analyze the trade-off between...

In this paper we study why, and when, and in what form, a satisficing strategy is a better bet for survival, than a strategy which uses the best available information in attempting to optimize the outcome. We prove that, under severe uncertainty, a robust-satisficing decision has a better...

In situations of relative calm and certainty, policy makers have confidence in the mechanisms at work and feel capable of attaining precise and ambitious results. As the environment becomes less and less certain, policy makers are confronted with the fact that there is a trade-off between the...

Do certain regions inherently enjoy an advantage in venture capital investment decisions? And how do industry characteristics affect venture capital activity? These questions fall under the reemerging study of economic geography, which suggests the importance of industrial location to economic...

We study a two-stage choice problem, where alternatives are allocations between the decision maker (DM) and a passive recipient. The recipient observes choice behavior in stage two, while stage one choice is unobserved. Choosing selfishly in stage two, in the face of a fairer available...

We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments that reduce flexibility. We show that such consumption commitments can induce consumers with risk-neutral underlying utility functions to be risk averse over small variations in income, but...

We study a decision maker (DM) who has recursive preferences over compound lotteries and who cares about the way uncertainty is resolved over time. DM has preferences for one-shot resolution of uncertainty (PORU) if he always prefers any compound lottery to be resolved in a single stage. We...