This article looks at the determinants of the choice of productive projects involving intertemporal contracts in rural Peru. In a setting where the formal education is limited, the successful launching of new financial instruments may be affected by the lack of proper understanding of their main...

We adopt an `epistemic' interpretation of social decisions: there is an objectively correct choice, each voter receives a `noisy signal' of the correct choice, and the social objective is to aggregate these signals to make the best possible guess about the correct choice. One epistemic method is...

We develop a model of social choice over lotteries, where people's psychological characteristics are mutable, their preferences may be incomplete, and approximate interpersonal comparisons of well-being are possible. Formally, we suppose individual preferences are described by a...

A ``difference preorder'' is a (possibly incomplete) preorder on a space of state changes (rather than the states themselves); it encodes information about preference intensity, in addition to ordinal preferences. We find necessary and sufficient conditions for a difference preorder to be...

We introduce a two-stage ranking of multidimensional alternatives, including uncertain prospects as particular case, when these objects can be given a suitable matrix form. The first stage defines a ranking of rows and a ranking of columns, and the second stage ranks matrices by applying natural...

Let X be a set of states, and let I be an infinite indexing set. Our first main result states that any separable, permutation-invariant preference order () on X^I admits an additive representation. That is: there exists a linearly ordered abelian group A and a `utility function' u:X--A such...

This paper reports the results of behavioral economic experiments conducted in Peru to examine the relationship amongst risk preferences, loan take-up, and insurance purchase decisions. This area-based yield insurance can help reduce people's vulnerability to large scale covariate shocks, and...

This paper estimates the risk preferences of cotton farmers in Southern Peru, using the results from a multiple-price-list lottery game. Assuming that preferences conform to two of the leading models of decision under risk--Expected Utility Theory (EUT) and Cumulative Prospect Theory...

Some social choice models assume that precise interpersonal comparisons of utility (either ordinal or cardinal) are possible, allowing a rich theory of distributive justice. Other models assume that absolutely no interpersonal comparisons are possible, or even meaningful; hence all...