Experts are asked to provide their advice in a situation of uncertainty. They adopt the decision maker’s utility function, but each has a potentially different set of prior probabilities, and so does the decision maker. The decision maker and the experts maximize the minimal expected utility...

The head of an organization is viewed as dealing with an optimization problem under a variety of constraints. The bureaucracy, by contrast, is viewed as dealing with the constraints alone: it has to make a multitude of low-level decisions, in such a way that no constraint is violated. However,...

This paper makes some preliminary steps towards a dynamic theory of consumer choices, restricted to the case of repeated small decisions. The authors assume that the consumer chooses among products, rather than among bundles, and that she bases her decision on a cumulative satisfaction index....

Several authors have indicated a contradiction between consistent aggregation of subjective beliefs and tastes, and a Pareto condition. We argue that the Pareto condition that implies the contradiction is not compelling. Society should not necessarily endorse a unanimous choice when it is based...

Economic modeling assumes, for the most part, that agents are Bayesian, that is, that they entertain probabilistic beliefs, objective or subjective, regarding any event in question. We argue that the formation of such beliefs calls for a deeper examination and for explicit modeling. Models of...

A literal interpretation of neo-classical consumer theory suggests that the consumer solves a very complex problem. In the presence of indivisible goods, the consumer problem is NP-Hard, and it appears unlikely that it can be optimally solved by humans. An alternative approach is suggested,...

We argue that the notion of Pareto dominance is not as compelling in the presence of uncertainty as it is under certainty. In particular, voluntary trade based on differences in tastes is commonly accepted as desirable, because tastes cannot be wrong. By contrast, voluntary trade based on...

We suggest a model in which theories are ranked given various databases. Certain axioms on such rankings imply a numerical representation that is the sum of the log-likelihood of the theory and a fixed number for each theory, which may be interpreted as a measure of its complexity. This additive...