Individual behavior under uncertainty is characterized using a new axiom, ordinal independence, which is a weakened form of the von Neumann-Morgenstern independence axiom. It states that if two distributions share a tail in common, then this tail can be modified without altering the individual's...

Gambles are recursively generated from pure payoffs, events, and other gambles, and a preference order over them is assumed. Weighted average utility representations are studied that are strictly increasing in each payoff and for which the weights depend both on the events underlying the gamble...

During the past generation, expected utility theory has been widely accepted as the normative standard for decisionmaking under risk and under uncertainty. However, it is now known that reasonable people often violate its assumptions, and a number of generalizations of the theory have been...

In late 1981 Federal workplace safety officers, and those of several states, began on-site checks of plants' injury records to determine which establishments to inspect. Critics claim incentives for underreporting were thus created, and that published injury rates could be biased downward....

First-price auction theory is extended to the case of heterogeneous bidders characterized by M-parameter log-concave utility functions. This model, and its specific two-parameter constant relative risk averse special case, is generally supported by the results of 47 experiments. The...