In this paper, we present the results of two experiments on social sampling, where people make a risky decision after they have sampled the behavior of others who have done exactly the same problem before them. In an individual decision making problem as well as in the takeover game, the simple behavioral rule of imitating the best appears to be a robust description of behavior despite the fact...

Aumann and Brandenburger [Econometrica 63 (1995), 1161 1180.] provide sufficient conditions on the knowledge of the players in a game for their beliefs to constitute a Nash equilibrium. They assume, among other things, mutual knowledge of rationality. By rationality of a player, it is meant that the action chosen by him maximizes his expected utility, given his beliefs. There is, however, no ne...

We address one aspect of the treatment of technical change in the environmental economics literature: how technical change impacts the marginal cost of abatement. We review a selection of papers that employ a variety of representations of technical change, and show that these representations have quite different, and sometimes surprising, effects on the marginal costs of pollution reductions. W...

Other-Regarding Preferences and Leadership Styles We use a laboratory experiment to examine whether and to what extent other-regarding preferences of team leaders influence their leadership style in choice under risk. We find that leaders who prefer efficiency or report high levels of selfishness are more likely to exercise an autocratic leadership style by ignoring preferences of the other tea...

We prove the existence of comonotone Pareto optimal allocations when decision makers have probabilistic sophisticated variational preferences and thus representing criteria in the class of law invariant robust utilities. In contrast to previous studies, we show that optimal allocations exist also when decision makers have very different preferences, for example characterized by different domain...

It is well known that risk increases the value of options. This article makes that precise in a new way. The conventional theorem says that the value of an option does not fall if the underlying asset becomes riskier in the conventional sense of the mean-preserving spread. This article uses two new definitions of ‘‘riskier’’ to show that the value of an option strictly increases (i) if the unde...

Abstract The paper analyzes strategic behavior in a two-stage environmental choice problem under di¤erent information scenarios. Given uncertainty about environmental cost and irreversibility of development, “learning without destroying”emerges from strategic competition when information is endogenous and publicly available. This happens since agents trade o¤ the higher payo¤of being the …rst-m...

We argue that “narrow framing,” whereby an agent who is offered a new gamble evaluates that gamble in isolation, may be a more important feature of decisionmaking than previously realized. Our starting point is the evidence that people are often averse to a small, independent gamble, even when the gamble is actuarially favorable. We find that a surprisingly wide range of utility functions, incl...

Global climate change presents a classic problem of decision making under uncertainty with learning. We provide stochastic dominance theorems that provide new insights into when abatement and investment into low carbon technology should increase in risk. We show that R&D into low-carbon technologies and near-term abatement are in some sense opposites in terms of risk. Abatement provides insuran...

This paper aims at assessing the optimal behavior of a firm facing stochastic costs of production. In an imperfectly competitive setting, we evaluate to what extent a firm may decide to locate part of its production in other markets different from which it is actually settled. This decision is taken in a stochastic environment. Portfolio theory is used to derive the optimal solution for the int...