This paper studies optimal access pricing for natural monopoly networks with large sunk costs and uncertain revenues. Using techniques from the option pricing literature, we show that the optimal access price corresponds to a risk-free form of the Efficiency Component Pricing Rule (ECPR), that is, where the opportunity cost is based on the risk free rate of return. We also show that at levels o...

In this paper, we provide an axiomatic characterization of social welfare functions for uncertain incomes. Our most general result is that a small number of reasonable assumptions regarding welfare orderings under uncertainty rule out pure ex ante as well as pure ex post evaluations. Any social welfare function that satisfies these axioms should lie strictly between the ex ante and the ex post ...

There exist several characterizations of concavity for univariate functions. One of them states that a function is concave if and only if it has nonincreasing differences. This definition provides a natural generalization of concavity for multivariate functions called inframodularity. Inframodular transfers are defined and it is shown that a finite lottery is preferred to another by all expecte...

In a continuous-time economy with complete markets, we show how the heterogeneity in the individual consumers’ risk attitudes and impatience would affect the representative consumer’s counterparts. Specifically, our formulas tell us how his risk tolerance and impatience will change over time, and how his impatience will be affected by the changes in aggregate consumption levels. Under the assum...

The paper introduces the concept of adjustment utility, that is, referencedependent utility from expectations. It offers an explanation for observed preferences that cannot be explained with existing models, and yields new predictions for individual decision making. The model gives a simple explanation for, e.g., why people are reluctant to change their plans even when these turn out to be unex...

This paper uses a novel empirical setting to explore the association between a firm’s operational risk, managerial monitoring costs, and the level of CEO equity incentives. We investigate a sample of supplier firms that rely on a few large customers for the bulk of their revenues. We predict that supplier firms with higher customer concentration face both higher exogenous idiosyncratic risk and...

The standard revealed preference argument relies on an implicit assumption that a decision maker considers all feasible alternatives. However, the marketing and psychology literatures provide well-established evidence that consumers do not consider all brands in a given market before making a purchase (Limited Attention). In this paper, we illustrate how one can deduce both the decision maker’s...

The de Finetti Theorem on exchangeable predictive priors is generalized to a framework where preference is represented by Choquet expected utility with respect to a belief function (a special capacity). The resulting model provides behavioral foundations for the decision-maker’s subjective theory of the environment in which there are factors common to all experiments (or sources of uncertainty)...

An individual who responds flexibly to wage changes may benefit from random wages. A necessary condition for a preference for wage risk is that the labour supply curve slopes up. Jointly sufficient conditions for wage risk to be preferred are that the individual is neutral to full income risk and the substitution effect of a wage change is at least twice the size of the total income effect. The...

We extend the classical results on the Walras-core existence and equivalence to an ambiguous asymmetric information economies, i.e., economies where agents maximize Maximin Expected Utility (MEU). The interest of considering ambiguity arises from the fact that, in the presence of MEU decision making, there is no conflict between efficiency and incentive compatibility, (contrary to the Bayesian ...