We compare the determinants of individual giving between two countries, Spain and the US, which differ in their redistribution policies and their beliefs over the causes of poverty. By varying the information about the determinants of income, we find that, although overall giving is similar in both countries when subjects know the actual role of luck and effort, Spanish subjects give more when ...

This paper proposes a preference-based condition for stochastic independence of a randomizing device in a product state space. This condition, when imposed on Choquet Expected Utility preferences in a Savage framework displaying uncertainty aversion, results in a collapse to Expected Utility (EU). In contrast, Maxmin EU with multiple priors preferences continue to allow for a very wide variety ...

We study portfolio allocation and characterize contracts issued by firms in the international financial market when investors exhibit ambiguity aversion and perceive ambiguity in assets issued in foreign locations. Increases in the variance of their risky production process cause firms to issue assets with a higher variable payment (equity). Hikes in investors’ perceived ambiguity have the oppo...

We define rationality and equilibrium when states specify agents’ actions and agents have arbitrary partitions over these states. Although some suggest that this natural modeling step leads to paradox, we show that Bayesian equilibrium is well defined and puzzles can be circumvented. The main problem arises when player j’s partition informs j of i’s move and i knows j’s strategy. Then i’s infer...

This paper considers a two agent model of trade with multiple priors. First, we characterize the existence of an agreeable bet on some event in terms of the set of priors. It is then shown that the existence of an agreeable bet on some event is a strictly stronger condition than the existence of an agreeable trade, whereas the two conditions are equivalent in the standard Bayesian framework. Se...

A decision maker with time consistent preferences may exhibit diminishing impatience, when uncertain lifetime is accounted for. Uncertain lifetime captures not only the risk of mortality, but also the possibility that a promise for a delayed reward might be breached, or a postponed consumption might not be realized. The restrictions that time consistency imposes on additive intertemporal prefer...

This paper examines irreversible investment in a project with uncertain returns, when there is an advantage to being the first to invest, and externalities to investing when others also do so. Pre-emption decreases and may even eliminate the option values created by irreversibility and uncertainty. Externalities introduce inefficiencies in investment decisions. Pre-emption and externalities com...

We compare the rationality of choice under risk – utility maximization, stochastic dominance, and expected-utility maximization – of students from one of the best universities in the US and one of the best universities in Africa. The US subjects came nearer to consistency with utility maximization and the dominance principle, but there are no differences between the two samples in consistency w...

Consumer risk preferences over income are derived from the optimal consumption bundle purchased at each income, via the construction of an indirect uility function. The paper shows that, even though an individual may exhibit risk averse preferences over a wide income range, consumer theory predicts that the opportunity to acquire high-priced luxury goods can induce a convexity in the indirect u...

Heterogeneity in Risky Choice Behaviour in a Broad Population We analyse risk preferences using an experiment with real incentives in a representative sample of 1,422 Dutch respondents. Our econometric model incorporates four structural parameters that vary with observed and unobserved characteristics: Utility curvature, loss aversion, preferences towards the timing of uncertainty resolution, a...