We investigate how individuals think groups should aggregate members’ ordinal preferences – that is, how they interpret “the will of the people.” In an experiment, we elicit revealed attitudes toward ordinal preference aggregation and classify subjects according to the rules they...

Increasing inequality and associated egalitarian sentiments have again put redistribution on the political agenda. Support for redistribution may also be affected by altruistic and egalitarian preferences, but knowledge about the distribution of these preferences in the broader population and...

We study intra-individual behavioral heterogeneity in an experimental Cournot oligopoly. Previous empirical results in this setting have demonstrated convergence to competitive outcomes, in agreement with theoretical predictions assuming that players imitate successful opponents. We postulate...

Influential economic approaches as random utility models or quantal-response equilibria assume a monotonic relation between error rates and choice difficulty or "strength of preference", in line with widespread evidence from discrimination tasks in psychology and neuroscience. However, while the...

We investigate the effects of constraining leverage and shrinking covariance matrix in constructing large portfolios, both theoretically and empirically. Considering a wide variety of setups that involve conditioning or not conditioning the covariance matrix estimator on the recent past...

Under rotation-equivariant decision theory, sample covariance matrix eigenvalues can be optimally shrunk by recombining sample eigenvectors with a (potentially nonlinear) function of the unobservable population covariance matrix. The optimal shape of this function reflects the loss/risk that is...

Many econometric and data-science applications require a reliable estimate of the covariance matrix, such as Markowitz portfolio selection. When the number of variables is of the same magnitude as the number of observations, this constitutes a difficult estimation problem; the sample covariance...

We model entrepreneurial finance using a combination of fiat money, credit cards, traditional bank loans, and home equity loans. The banking sector is over-the-counter, where bargaining determines the pass-through from the nominal interest rate to the bank lending rate, characterizing the...

Sellers often have the power to censor the reviews of their products. We explore the effect of these censorship policies in markets where some consumers are unaware of possible censorship. We find that if the share of such “naive” consumers is not too large, then rational consumers treat any...

The ability to uncover preferences from choices is fundamental for both positive economics and welfare analysis. Overwhelming evidence shows that choice is stochastic, which has given rise to random utility models as the dominant paradigm in applied microeconomics. However, as is well known, it...