We estimate the causal effects of air pollution exposure on low birthweight, birth-weight, and prematurity risk in South China, for all expectant mothers and by maternal age group and child sex. We do so by exploiting exogenous improvement in air quality during the 2010 Guangzhou Asian Games,...

This paper investigates whether associations between birth weight and prenatal ambient environmental conditions--pollution and extreme temperatures--are mediated by 1) inequality in socioeconomic endowments measured by maternal education; 2) inequality in children's innate health endowments; and...

We study a decision maker who faces a dynamic decision problem in which the process of information arrival is subjective. By studying preferences over menus of acts, we derive a sequence of utility representations that captures the decision maker’s uncertainty about the beliefs he will hold...

We study a two-stage choice problem, where alternatives are allocations between the decision maker (DM) and a passive recipient. The recipient observes choice behavior in stage two, while stage one choice is unobserved. Choosing selfishly in stage two, in the face of a fairer available...

We study a decision maker (DM) who has recursive preferences over compound lotteries and who cares about the way uncertainty is resolved over time. DM has preferences for one-shot resolution of uncertainty (PORU) if he always prefers any compound lottery to be resolved in a single stage. We...

A major virtue of von Neumann-Morgenstern utility, for example, in the theory of general financial equilibrium (GFE), is that it ensures time consistency: consumption-portfolio plans (for the future) are in fact executed (in the future) - assuming that there is perfect foresight about relevant...

A major virtue of von Neumann-Morgenstern utilities, for example, in the theory of general financial equilibrium (GFE), is that they ensure intertemporal consistency: consumption-portfolio plans (for the future) are in fact executed (in the future) - assuming that there is perfect foresight...

We study the attitude of decision makers to skewed noise. For a binary lottery that yields the better outcome with probability p, we identify noise around p, with a compound lottery that induces a distribution over the exact value of the probability and has an average value p. We propose and...

Maximizing subjective expected utility is the classic model of decision making under uncertainty. Savage (1954) provides axioms on preference over acts that are equivalent to the existence of a subjective expected utility representation, and further establishes that such a representation is...

Individuals often tend to conform to the choices of others in group decisions, compared to choices made in isolation, giving rise to phenomena such as group polarization and the bandwagon effect. We show that this behavior, which we term the consensus effect, is equivalent to a well-known...