Acknowledgments: We thank Paul Glimcher for his comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.

We find a necessary and sufficient condition for ex-ante trade when agents are non-expected utility maximizers. The condition is that they share subjective beliefs. Our result holds for a class of convex preferences that contains many functional forms used in applications. In a special case of expected utility, the condition becomes exactly the common prior assumption. It can also be articulate...

I consider a model of directed search in which strategic sellers advertise general trading mechanisms. A mechanism determines the number of buyers that will get served and the side payments as a function of ex post realized demand. After observing these advertisements buyers simultaneously visit exactly one seller. Each buyer’s expected utility depends on the visiting decisions of other buyers....

This paper contains an analysis of a simple principal-agent problem illustrating possible problems that may arise when the prinicpal ascribes to the agent subjective probabilities and utilities that are implied by the subjective expected utility model but do not represent the agent’s beliefs and valuations. In particular, it is possible that an incentive contract designed by the principal induc...

We study a model of non-Bayesian updating, based on the Hypothesis Testing model of Ortoleva (2012), for ambiguity averse agents. Agents ranks acts following the MaxMin Expected Utility model of Gilboa and Schmeidler (1989) and when they receive new information they update their set of priors as follows: If the information is such that all priors in the original set of priors assign to it a pro...

The transportation business sector, along with many others, has not, to a large extent, evaluated the possibility of gaining advantages through the use of more elaborated decision tools for operational decision making. This article presents a case study where an interval based decision tool was used for transportation business applications. The investigation was made in collaboration with a wel...

We discuss an economy which is subject to aggregate productivity shocks affecting all factors of production. The additional presence of income risk shifts the margin where agents save out of precautionary motives downwards, such that it does no longer correspond to logarithmic preferences.

This paper performs new and more robust tests of the QALY model when health varies over time. Our tests do not involve confounding assumptions and are robust to violations of expected utility. Our results support the use of QALYs at the aggregate level, i.e. in economic evaluations of health care. At the individual level, there is less support for QALYs. The individual data are, however, largel...

In random incentive mechanisms agents choose from multiple problems and a randomization device selects a single problem to determine payment. Agents are assumed to act as if they faced each problem on its own. While this approach is valid when agents are expected utility maximizers, ambiguity-averse agents may use the randomization device to hedge and thereby contaminate the data.