Conflicts of interest arise between a decision maker and agents who have information pertinent to the problem because of differences in their preferences over outcomes. We show how the decision maker can extract the information by distorting the decisions that will be taken, and show that only...

Prior research on “strategic voting” has reached the conclusion that unanimity rule is uniquely bad: it results in destruction of information, and hence makes voters worse off. We show that this conclusion depends critically on the assumption that the issue being voted on is exogenous, i.e.,...

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...

Many violations of the Independence axiom of Expected Utility can be traced to subjects' attraction to risk-free prospects. Negative Certainty Independence, the key axiom in this paper, formalizes this tendency. Our main result is a utility representation of all preferences over monetary...

We show that political booms, measured by the rise in governments’ popularity, predict financial crises above and beyond other better-known early warning indicators, such as credit booms. This predictive power, however, only holds in emerging economies. We show that governments in emerging...

We propose a model of history-dependent risk attitude, allowing a decision maker’s risk attitude to be affected by his history of disappointments and elations. The decision maker recursively evaluates compound risks, classifying realizations as disappointing or elating using a threshold rule....

We study an individual who faces a dynamic decision problem in which the process of information arrival is unobserved by the analyst. We elicit subjective information directly from choice behavior by deriving two utility representations of preferences over menus of acts. One representation...

We study an individual who faces a dynamic decision problem in which the process of information arrival is unobserved by the analyst. We elicit subjective information directly from choice behavior by deriving two utility representations of preferences over menus of acts. The most general...

Many violations of the Independence axiom of Expected Utility can be traced to subjects' attraction to risk-free prospects. The key axiom in this paper, Negative Certainty Independence (Dillenberger, 2010), formalizes this tendency. Our main result is a utility representation of all preferences...