In an exchange economy under uncertainty populated by multiple consumers, we how the heterogeneity in the individual consumers’ subjective beliefs affect the representative consumer’s utility function. We derive a formula that indicates that the more heterogeneous the individual consumers’ beliefs are, the higher probabilities the representative consumer’s belief attaches to extreme events that...

This paper characterizes properties of chance attitudes (nonadditive measures). It does so for decision under uncertainty (unknown probabilities), where it assumes Choquet expected utility, and for decision under risk (known probabilities), where it assumes rank-dependent utility. It analyzes chance attitude independently from utility. All preference conditions concern simple violations of the ...

Wary consumers overlook gains but not losses in remote sets of dates or states. As preferences are upper but not lower Mackey semi-continuous, Bewley’s (1972) [4] result on existence of equilibrium whose prices are not necessarily countably additive holds. Wariness is related to lack of myopia and to ambiguity aversion (and, therefore, to Bewley’s (1986) [6] work on Knightian uncertainty). Wary...

An experiment tested whether and in what circumstances people are more likely to believe an event simply because it makes them better off. Subjects observed a financial asset’s historical price chart, and received both an accuracy bonus for predicting the price at some future point, and an unconditional award that was either increasing or decreasing in this price. Despite incentives for hedging...

In an exchange economy under uncertainty with two periods, one physical good, and finitely many states of the world, we show that for every (complete or incomplete) market span there exists a sequence of securities such that if they are introduced into markets one by one, the prices of any security is not affected by the subsequent introduction of newer securities and they together generate the...

Venture capitalists deliver investments to entrepreneurs in stages. This paper shows staged financing to be efficient. Staging lets investors abandon ventures with low early returns, and thus sorts good projects from bad. The primary implication from staging is that it is efficient to invest more in later rounds. The model yields a number of empirical implications on how the ratio of early to l...

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)...

We formulate a consumption-based asset pricing model in which aggregate risk aversion is time-varying in response to both news about consumption growth (as in a habit formation model) and news about inflation. We estimate our model and explore its pricing implications for the term structure of interest rates and the cross-section of stock returns. Our empirical results support the hypothesis th...

Infinite hierarchies of awareness and beliefs arise in games with unawareness, similarly to belief hierarchies in standard games. A natural question is whether each hierarchy describes the player’s awareness of the hierarchies of other players and beliefs over these, or whether the reasoning can continue indefinitely. This paper constructs the universal type structure with unawareness where eac...

We argue that arbitrage is limited if rational traders face uncertainty about when their peers will exploit a common arbitrage opportunity. This synchronization risk—which is distinct from noise trader risk and fundamental risk—arises in our model because arbitrageurs become sequentially aware of mispricing and they incur holding costs. We show that rational arbitrageurs ‘‘time the market’’ rat...