Since its creation in 1934, the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) has had authority to approve or deny the consummation of transactions by wireless and wired communications firms under a public interest standard. Despite the passage of decades, neither the FCC nor the courts have put...

We refine the understanding of individual preferences across social lotteries, whereby the payoffs of a pair of subjects are exposed to random shocks. We find that aggregate behavior is ex-post and ex-ante inequality averse, but also that there is a wide variety of individual preferences and...

The use of rationalized risk assessment to identify the costs and benefits of protecting Aboriginal sacred sites is ubiquitous in Canadian law. Like other contemporary critics of cost-benefit analysis, I voice concerns with its use to adjudicate moral claims and recognize that it can misidentify...

Uncertainty is prevalent in the context of climate change impacts. Moreover, the distribution across the globe is not uniform. We analyze how climate risks could be reduced via an insurance scheme at the global scale across regions and quantify the potential welfare gains from such a scheme....

We combine empathetic and reference-dependent preferences to a more comprehensive model of decision-making. Empathy can refer to other people's basic needs (exogenous reference points) as well as others' ambitions in the form of social comparisons. Empathy with others' ambitions results in...

In this study we experimentally investigate whether solidarity, which is a crucial base for informal insurance arrangements in developing countries, is sensitive to the extent to which individuals can influence their risk exposure. With slum dwellers of Nairobi our design measures subjects'...

Utilitarianism is the most prominent family of social welfare functions. We present three new axiomatic characterizations of utilitarian (that is, additively separable) social welfare functions in a setting where there is risk over both population size and the welfares of individuals. First, we...

We show that perceptions of relative rank in the wealth distribution shape individuals' willingness to take risks. Using a representative large-scale survey, we manipulate perceptions of relative standing by randomly varying response categories when asking respondents about their wealth level....

We show that perceptions of relative rank in the wealth distribution shape individuals’ willingness to take risks. Using a representative large-scale survey, we manipulate perceptions of relative standing by randomly varying response categories when asking respondents about their wealth level....

This Article analyzes how to challenge AAPI (Asian American Pacific Islander) hate, defined as explicit negative bias in racial beliefs towards AAPIs. In economics, beliefs are subjective probabilities over possible outcomes. Traditional neoclassical economics views beliefs as inputs to making...