Related papers: Random Utility with Unobservable Alternatives

In the theory of social choice the research is focused around the projection of individual preference orders to the social preference order. Also, the justification of the preference order formalism begins with the concept of utility i.e.…

Econometrics is based on the nonempiric notion of utility. Prices, dynamics, and market equilibria are supposed to be derived from utility. Utility is usually treated by economists as a price potential, other times utility rates are treated…

We study the optimal investment problem for a continuous time incomplete market model such that the risk-free rate, the appreciation rates and the volatility of the stocks are all random; they are assumed to be independent from the driving…

Accuracy of economic theories and efficiency of economic policy strictly depend on the choice of the economic variables and processes mostly liable for description of economic reality. That states the general problem of assessment of any…

Mutually exclusive decisions have been studied for decades. Many well-known decision theories have been defined to help people either to make rational decisions or to interpret people's behaviors, such as expected utility theory, regret…

We study the design of mechanisms under asymmetric awareness and information. While the mechanism designer cannot necessarily commit to a particular social choice function in the face of unawareness, she can at least commit to properties of…

The econometric literature on treatment-effects typically takes functionals of outcome-distributions as `social welfare' and ignores program-impacts on unobserved utilities. We show how to incorporate aggregate utility within econometric…

Models allowing for random heterogeneity, such as mixed logit and latent class, are generally observed to obtain superior model fit and yield detailed insights into unobserved preference heterogeneity. Using theoretical arguments and two…

Instead of testing for unanimous agreement, I propose learning how broad of a consensus favors one distribution over another (of earnings, productivity, asset returns, test scores, etc.). Specifically, given a sample from each of two…

We provide sufficient conditions for semi-nonparametric point identification of a mixture model of decision making under risk, when agents make choices in multiple lines of insurance coverage (contexts) by purchasing a bundle. As a first…

There is a growing need for discrete choice models that account for the complex nature of human choices, escaping traditional behavioral assumptions such as the transitivity of pairwise preferences. Recently, several parametric models of…

We consider a sequence of repeated interactions between an agent and an environment. Uncertainty about the environment is captured by a probability distribution over a space of hypotheses, which includes all computable functions. Given a…

We consider the optimal investment and marginal utility pricing problem of a risk averse agent and quantify their exposure to a small amount of model uncertainty. Specifically, we compute explicitly the first-order sensitivity of their…

Tackling the problem of ordinal preference revelation and reasoning, we propose a novel methodology for generating an ordinal utility function from a set of qualitative preference statements. To the best of our knowledge, our proposal…

In many choice settings self-punishment affects individual taste, by inducing the decision maker (DM) to disregard some of the best options. In these circumstances the DM may not maximize her true preference, but some harmful distortion of…

The Plackett--Luce model has been extensively used for rank aggregation in social choice theory. A central statistical question in this model concerns estimating the utility vector that governs the model's likelihood. In this paper, we…

We propose a framework for nonparametric identification and estimation of discrete choice models with unobserved choice sets. We recover the joint distribution of choice sets and preferences from a panel dataset on choices. We assume that…

When allocating indivisible objects via lottery, planners often use ordinal mechanisms, which elicit agents' rankings of objects rather than their full preferences over lotteries. In such an ordinal informational environment, planners…

This paper develops a framework to study the statistical power of revealed-preference tests. With randomly sampled budgets and mild smoothness of demand, statistical learning implies that any model consistent with the data must approximate…

Standard decision theory seeks conditions under which a preference relation can be compressed into a single real-valued function. However, when preferences are incomplete or intransitive, a single function fails to capture the agent's…