We present a model of inductive inference that includes, as special cases, Bayesian reasoning, case-based reasoning, and rule-based reasoning. This unified framework allows us to examine, positively or normatively, how the various modes of inductive inference can be combined and how their...

It is the 100th anniversary of Irving Fisher’s 1911 book The Purchasing Power of Money. But, more important than that, it is a good time, during the current financial turmoil, to reconsider some of his theories again, in light of current events. And I think that some of his theories about...

We show how the timing of financial innovation might have contributed to the mortgage bubble and then to the crash of 2007-2009. We show why tranching and leverage first raised asset prices and why CDS lowered them afterwards. This may seem puzzling, since it implies that creating a derivative...

Most theories of risky choice postulate that a decision maker maximizes the expectation of a Bernoulli (or utility or similar) function. We tour 60 years of empirical search and conclude that no such functions have yet been found that are useful for out-of-sample prediction. Nor do we find...

This essay is the introduction for a collection of papers by the two of us on "Robust Mechanism Design" to be published by World Scientific Publishing. The appendix of this essay lists the chapters of the book. The objective of this introductory essay is to provide the reader with an overview of...

Languages differ widely in the ways they encode time. I test the hypothesis that languages that grammatically associate the future and the present, foster future-oriented behavior. This prediction arises naturally when well-documented effects of language structure are merged with models of...

We study optimal contracting in team settings, featuring stylized aspects of production environments with complex tasks. Agents have many opportunities to shirk, task-level monitoring is needed to provide useful incentives, and because it is difficult to write individual performance into formal...

We analyze games of incomplete information and offer equilibrium predictions which are valid for all possible private information structures that the agents may have. Our characterization of these robust predictions relies on an epistemic result which establishes a relationship between the set...

Baggerly (1998) showed that empirical likelihood is the only member in the Cressie-Read power divergence family to be Bartlett correctable. This paper strengthens Baggerly's result by showing that in a generalized class of the power divergence family, which includes the Cressie-Read family...

This paper analyzes the properties of a class of estimators, tests, and confidence sets (CS's) when the parameters are not identified in parts of the parameter space. Specifically, we consider estimator criterion functions that are sample averages and are smooth functions of a parameter theta....