A quantitative knowledge of the consequence of risk inherent in agricultural production and farmer's reactions to them are of considerable importance in evaluating alternative government programmes and policies directed towards stabilization of prices and income in the agricultural sector. Yet...

We experimentally investigate whether the satisficing approach is absorbable, i.e., whether it still applies after participants become aware of it. In a setting where an investor decides between a riskless bond and either one or two risky assets, we familiarize participants with the satisficing...

The Precautionary Principle has been proposed as the proper behaviour to adopt in the face of the new catastrophic risks that have made their appearance in the last decades. We advance a workable definition of the Precautionary Principle and apply it to the possible outbreak among humans of the...

In this paper I provide a descriptive model of choice over time by a population of constrained maximizing agents. Agents’ choice sets are markovian in the sense that they depend on previous choices. The unperturbed dynamics turns out to be trapped into local maxima whatever the length of...

The paper develops a public education scheme that takes aspects of uncertainty in private educational investments explicitly into account. The social merits of public education schemes are related to the lack of markets in which students can insure against educational risks. A case is made for...

This paper considers the problem of an imperfectly informed regulator constrained in his choice of environmental regulation by the political opposition of those affected by the policy. We compare the value of two types of information to the regulator: the social cost of pollution and the...

The mathematical representation of Brunswik’s lens model has been used extensively to study human judgment and provides a unique opportunity to conduct a meta-analysis of studies that covers roughly five decades. Specifically, we analyze statistics of the “lens model equation” (Tucker,...

We use subjects’ actions in modified dictator games to perform a within-subject classification of individuals into four different types of interdependent preferences: Selfish, Social Welfare maximizers, Inequity Averse and Competitive. We elicit beliefs about other subjects’ actions in the...

This paper explores three aspects of strategic uncertainty: its relation to risk, predictability of behavior and subjective beliefs of players. In a laboratory experiment we measure subjects’ certainty equivalents for three coordination games and one lottery. Behavior in coordination games is...