This paper analyzes collective decision making when individual preferences evolve through learning.  Votes are affected by their anticipated effect on future preferences.  The analysis is conducted in a two-arm bandit model with a safe alternative and a risky alternative whose payoff...

In many economic applications involving comparisons of multivariate distributions, supermodularity of an objective function is a natural property for capturing a preference for greater interdependence.  One multivariate distribution dominates another according to the supermodular stochastic...

This paper identifies two notions of substitutes for auction and equilibrium analysis. Weak substitutes, the usual price-theory notion, guarantees monotonicity of Tatonnement processes and convergence of clock auctions to a pseudo-equilibrium, but only strong substitutes, which treats each unit...

We prove that under standard Lipschitz and growth conditions, the value function of all optimal control problems for one-dimensional diffusions is twice continuously differentiable, as long as the control space is compact and the volatility is uniformly bounded below, away from zero. Under...

We study social learning and innovation in an overlapping generations model, emphasizing the trade-off between marginal innovation (combining existing technologies) and radical innovation (breaking new ground). We characterize both short-term and long-term dynamics of innovation, and the...

We distinguish two notions of substitutes for discrete inputs of a firm. Class substitutes are defined assuming that units of a given input have the same price while unitary substitutes treat each unit as a distinct input with its own price. Unitary substitutes is necessary and sufficient for...

How do discount rates affect agents’ decisions and valuations? This paper provides a general method to analyze this question, allowing stochastic and managed cash flows, stochastic discount rates, and time inconsistency and including arbitrary learning and payoff or utility processes. We show...