In this paper, the author separates the economic from the psychological aspects of labor market behavior and argues that the psychological ones deserve careful study.

Stimulated by Frank Knight's work, "Risk, Uncertainty and Profit," I present a theory of innovation based on what I term Knightian decision theory. This theory includes a concept of uncertainty aversion, a behavioral property that makes people reluctant to undertake new unevaluatable risks. This...

This paper contains a review of work on wage rigidity. The work includes field studies, and economic experiments, and psychological surveys. Economists have done the field studies and experiments, and management scientists and experimental psychologists have done the surveys.

An uncertainty averse Knightian decision maker has a set of probability distributions over outcomes and chooses something other than the status quo only if the change increases the expected payoff according to all the distributions. It is possible to define a standardized degree of uncertainty...