Related papers: New developments in revealed preference theory: de…
A decision maker's utility depends on her action $a\in A \subset \mathbb{R}^d$ and the payoff relevant state of the world $\theta\in \Theta$. One can define the value of acquiring new information as the difference between the maximum…
Budgeted uncertainty sets have been established as a major influence on uncertainty modeling for robust optimization problems. A drawback of such sets is that the budget constraint only restricts the global amount of cost increase that can…
We revisit the role of instrumental value as a driver of adaptive behavior. In active inference, instrumental or extrinsic value is quantified by the information-theoretic surprisal of a set of observations measuring the extent to which…
Energy infrastructure planning under uncertainty has become increasingly complex as electrification, interdependence between energy carriers, decarbonization, and extreme weather events reshape long-term investment decisions. This paper…
This paper studies a type of consumption preference where some adjustment costs are incured whenever the past spending maximum and the past spending minimum records are updated. This preference can capture the adverse effects of the…
Standard evolutionary theories of aging and mortality, implicitly based on assumptions of spatial averaging, hold that natural selection cannot favor shorter lifespan without direct compensating benefit to individual reproductive success.…
An agent acquires a costly flexible signal before making a decision. We explore to what degree knowledge of the agent's information costs helps predict her behavior. We establish an impossibility result: learning costs alone generate no…
Social choice theory offers a wealth of approaches for selecting a candidate on behalf of voters based on their reported preference rankings over options. When voters have underlying utilities for these options, however, using preference…
The expectation is an example of a descriptive statistic that is monotone with respect to stochastic dominance, and additive for sums of independent random variables. We provide a complete characterization of such statistics, and explore a…
In stochastic decision problems, one often wants to estimate the underlying probability measure statistically, and then to use this estimate as a basis for decisions. We shall consider how the uncertainty in this estimation can be…
As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…
We explore intertemporal preferences that are recursive and account for local intertemporal substitution. First, we establish a rigorous foundation for these preferences and analyze their properties. Next, we examine the associated optimal…
This paper proposes a method for estimating consumer preferences among discrete choices, where the consumer chooses at most one product in a category, but selects from multiple categories in parallel. The consumer's utility is additive in…
This paper assumes each individual in society has a random discount factor and assesses an intertemporal project using rank-dependent expected utility theory. We consider both the ex ante and the ex post approaches. For the former, we show…
This paper introduces a rule for policy selection in the presence of estimation uncertainty, explicitly accounting for estimation risk. The rule belongs to the class of risk-aware rules on the efficient decision frontier, characterized as…
Counterfactual utilities evaluate decisions not only by the realized outcome under a given decision, but also by the counterfactual outcomes that would arise under alternative decisions. By generalizing standard utility frameworks, they…
We examine how the empirical content of revealed preference theory depends on the dimensionality of the choice environment. While higher-dimensional choice problems may appear more demanding, we show that revealed preference restrictions…
A variety of statistical graphical models have been defined to represent the conditional independences underlying a random vector of interest. Similarly, many different graphs embedding various types of preferential independences, as for…
This paper studies a potential outcome model with a continuous or discrete outcome, a discrete multi-valued treatment, and a discrete multi-valued instrument. We derive sharp, closed-form testable implications for a class of restrictions on…
Controversy about the significance of underdetermination of theories persists in the philosophy and conduct of science. The issue has practical import when research is used to inform decision making, because scientific uncertainty yields…