The premises of this paper rely on associating policy inertia toward action on climate change with the inadequacy of the classical ‘liability culture’ of evidence-based policy-making to deal with this global environmental challenge. To provide support to this hypothesis, the following...

The theory of stochastic dominance applied to financial decisions associates classes of investors with classes of gambles (random payoffs). Each investor resides in a class of mixed risk averters (MRA). Pairs of gambles, say, X and Y are classified according to a collection of mathematical...

This paper characterize two preorders over vectors, representing here income distributions, which, for the case of an order-preserving additive welfare function, corresponds the the increasing concave functions which are more concave than ln(x) and than -1/x, respectively. We provide a...

Social norms play a striking role in shaping behavior, but our understanding of when and why people respect social norms is still limited. A growing literature demonstrates the effectiveness of a social comparison nudge in producing norm-compliant behaviors. We construct a decision-theoretic...

We conduct a laboratory experiment where third-party spectators can redistribute resources between two agents, thereby offsetting the consequences of controllable and uncontrollable luck. Some spectators go to the limits and equalize all or no inequalities, but many follow an interior allocation...

We present and discuss a binary relation aimed at the study of the re-distribution of income. We characterize, in a number of ways, the set of income allocations that can be reached from an initial allocation through a sequence of pair-wise equalizing transfers, where the sequence contains no...

In his presidential address to the American Economic Association, Robert Lucas claimed that the welfare costs of the business cycle in the United States equaled .05 percent of consumption. His calculation compared the utility of a representative consumer receiving actual per-capita consumption...

Principals can attempt to get agents to perform certain actions preferable to the principal by using ex-post punishments or rewards to align incentives. Field data is mixed on whether, and to what extent, such informal incentive contracting crowds out efficient solutions to the agency problem....

Disaster planning for health care providers following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and, more recently, Hurricane Katrina, focuses on preparing hospitals and other emergency services to respond to victims' medical needs. But little attention has been paid to the challenges that...