Core-selection is a crucial property of social choice functions, or rules, in social choice literature. It is also desirable to address the incentive of agents to cheat by misreporting their preferences. This paper investigates an exchange problem where each agent may have multiple indivisible goods, agents’ preferences over sets of goods are assumed to be lexicographic, and side payments are n...

This paper investigates the extent to which rural households in developing countries are able to smooth consumption, using a model of full risk sharing, in which participating households have different risk and time preferences. A resulting rule of resource allocation is characterized in an intuitive way, clarifying the effects of diverse preferences. Empirical models are applied to a household...

Infinitesimal calculus is heavily used in decision making analysis. This paper demonstrates that the application of quantum calculus in analysing preferences choice directly introduces background risk and its effects on risk-aversion, subjective probabilities and moment preferences. Quantum calculus provides another approach to the mathematical treatment of decision making, namely analysis of u...

A large strand of research has identified conditions on preferences under which (i) a single risk is undesirable and (ii) two independent risks aggravate each other. We extend this line of inquiry by establishing conditions such that (iii) the degree of mutual aggravation is greater for more severe risks. Here, the severity of risks is characterized by means of general stochastic dominance shif...

Standard economic theory assumes individuals make decisions over a set of risky domains according to their own risk preferences which are stable across these decision contexts. The validity of this assumption of context-invariant risk preference has led to debate in the literature. We exploit latent class analysis to identify conditional on predicted and realized risk how heterogeneity in risk ...

Across many forms of rent seeking contests, the impact of risk aversion on equilibrium play is indeterminate. We design an experiment to compare individuals’ decisions across three contests which are isomorphic under risk-neutrality, but are typically not isomorphic under other risk preferences. The pattern of individual play across our contests is not consistent with a Bayes-Nash equilibrium f...

We derive necessary and sufficient conditions in order for binary voting choices over a finite number of pairs of alternatives to be consistent with voter preferences that admit concave utility representations. These conditions imply simple testable restrictions on the location of voters’ ideal points, and can be used to predict individual voting behavior. On the other hand, if the location of ...

People’s choices can be predicted given information about their preferences. Learning people’s preferences is the inverse problem of inferring preferences from choices. Given the apparent relationship between choice prediction and preference learning, it is natural to ask whether the two are mutually consistent. Given weak assumptions, we show that no single, consistent model of the relationshi...

This paper studies differences in inequality perceptions, distributional norms, and redistributive preferences between East and West Germany. As expected, there are substantial differences with respect to all three of these measures. Surprisingly, however, differences in distributional norms are much smaller than differences with respect to inequality perceptions or redistributive preferences. ...