This note questions the behavioral content of second-order acts and their use in decision theoretic models. We show that there can be no verification mechanism to determine what the decision maker receives under a second-order act. This impossibility applies even in idealized repeated...

A preference is invariant with respect to a transformation tau if its ranking of acts is unaffected by a reshuffling of the states under tau. We show that any invariant preference must be parametric: there is a unique sufficient set of parameters such that the preference ranks acts according to...

Authority relationships are viewed as reciprocal exchange in which a principal offers rents in return for subordinates' compliance with his authority. These rents induce compliance by creating a collective action problem among subordinates so they free-ride on each other in challenging the...

The paper develops a new modeling framework to study factor structures and Arbitrage Pricing Theory in large asset markets. The asset economy in this framework consists of a continuum of assets. Finite subsets of assets are interpreted as random draws from the underlying economy. I show that the...

The paper studies a contracting problem in which a Principal enters in two-sided moral hazards with N independent agents. There are no technological or informational linkages between the N agency problems: The Principal's costs are additive across agents; there is no common uncertainty in the...