We consider a family of exchange economies where consumers have multiprior preferences representing their ambiguity aversion. Under a linear independence assumption, we prove that regular economies are generic. Regular economies exhibit enjoyable properties: odd finite number of equilibrium prices, local constancy of this number and local differentiable selections of the equilibrium prices. Thu...

In this paper we explore the use of selectional preferences for detecting noncompositional verb-object combinations. To characterise the arguments in a given grammatical relationship we experiment with three models of selectional preference. Two use WordNet and one uses the entries from a distributional thesaurus as classes for representation. In previous work on selectional preference acquisit...

In decision making, negotiation, and other kinds of practical reasoning, it is necessary to model preferences over possible outcomes. Such preferences usually depend on multiple criteria. We argue that the criteria by which outcomes are evaluated should be the satisfaction of a person’s underlying interests: the more an outcome satisfies his interests, the more preferred it is. Underlying inter...

We examine racial preferences in dating. We employ a Speed Dating experiment that allows us to directly observe individual decisions and thus infer whose preferences lead to racial segregation in romantic relationships. Females exhibit stronger racial preferences than males. The richness of our data further allows us to identify many determinants of same-race preferences. Subjects’ backgrounds,...

Given positive integers d and n, there is an integer N such that for every injective map ffrom { 1 ..... N} a into R there is a subset A = A1 x A2 x ... × Ad of { 1 ..... N} a such that (1) each Aj has n elements, (2) the restriction of f to A is monotone in each coordinate, (3) there is an ordering of the coordinates such that f on A is texicographic with respect to that ordering. Because inje...

The finding that the preferences of middle-income Americans are ignored when they diverge from the preferences of the rich is one of the most widely accepted and influential conclusions in political science research today. I offer a cautionary note regarding this conclusion. I demonstrate that even on those issues for which the preferences of the wealthy and those in the middle diverge, policy ...

Empirical studies of the connection between citizen preferences and legislator actions have largely focused on the preferences of a district’s average or median voter. While many theories suggest that preference heterogeneity should also affect this connection, few empirical analyses have rigorously tested claims about the distribution of individual voter preferences. In this paper, we use a un...

We present a simple and natural non-pricing mechanism for allocating divisible goods among strategic agents having lexicographic preferences. Our mechanism has favorable properties of strategy-proofness (incentive compatibility). In addition (and even when extended to the case of Leontief bundles) it enjoys Pareto efficiency, envy-freeness, and time efficiency. 1998 ACM Subject Classification F...

T he 2008 annual Math Awareness Month theme features the unusual combination of “Mathematics and Voting”. The importance of voting is obvious; indeed, with the United States election season hard upon us, discussions about voting are seemingly nonstop. More generally, on almost any day of any year the news media reports on some consequential election going on somewhere in the world. But what doe...