Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. But are these biases learned or innate? We investigate this question using experiments on a novel set of subjects — capuchin monkeys. By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin...

Savage motivated his Sure Thing Principle by arguing that, whenever an act would be preferred if an event obtains and preferred if that event did not obtain, then it should be preferred overall. The idea that it should be possible to decompose and recompose decision problems in this way has...

Savage (1954) provided a set of axioms on preferences over acts that were equivalent to the existence of an expected utility representation. We show that in addition to this representation, there is a continuum of other "expected utility" representations in which for any act, the probability...

We consider preference relations over information that are monotone: more information is preferred to less. We prove that, if a preference relation on information about an uncountable set of states of nature is monotone, then it is not representable by a utility function.

Why did evolution not give us a utility function that is offspring alone? Why do we care intrinsically about other outcomes, such as food, and what determines the intensity of such preferences? A common view is that such other outcomes enhance fitness and the intensity of our preference for a...

Why did evolution not give us a utility function that is offspring alone? Why do we care intrinsically about other outcomes, food, for example, and what determines the intensity of such preferences? A common view is that such other outcomes enhance fitness and the intensity of our preference for...

An overlapping generations model of an exchange economy is considered, with individuals having a finite expected life-span. Conditions concerning birth, death, inheritance and bequests are fully specified. Under such conditions, the existence of stationary Markov equilibrium is established in...

Examples of repeated destructive behavior abound throughout the history of human societies. This paper examines the role of social memory -- a society's vicarious beliefs about the past -- in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts. We examine whether such behavior is consistent with the...

A predictor is asked to rank eventualities according to their plausibility, based on past cases. We assume that she can form a ranking given any memory that consists of finitely many past cases. Mild consistency requirements on these rankings imply that they have a numerical representation via a...

We describe conditions for the existence of a stationary Markovian equilibrium when total production or total endowment is a random variable. Apart from regularity assumptions, there are two crucial conditions: (i) low information -- agents are ignorant of both total endowment and their own...