The observed patterns of equity portfolio allocation around the world are at odds with predictions from a capital asset pricing model (CAPM). What has come to be called the “home-bias” phenomenon is that investors tend to hold a disproportionately large share of their equity portfolio in...

We employ a new decision-theoretic approach to dealing with Knightian uncertainty based on Simon's bounded rationality. The basic tool of this approach is a quantitative answer to the question: For a specified policy, among a set of policies, how much can our assumptions regarding e.g. model and...

We employ information-gap decision theory to derive a robust monetary policy response to Knightian parameter uncertainty. This approach provides a quantitative answer to the question: For a specified policy, how much can our models and data err or vary, without rendering the outcome of that...

Purpose – To study the effect of Knightian uncertainty – as opposed to statistical estimation error – in the evaluation of value-at-risk (VaR) of financial investments. To develop methods for augmenting existing VaR estimates to account for Knightian uncertainty....

In this paper we study why, and when, and in what form, a satisficing strategy is a better bet for survival, than a strategy which uses the best available information in attempting to optimize the outcome. We prove that, under severe uncertainty, a robust-satisficing decision has a better...

In situations of relative calm and certainty, policy makers have confidence in the mechanisms at work and feel capable of attaining precise and ambitious results. As the environment becomes less and less certain, policy makers are confronted with the fact that there is a trade-off between the...

We employ the robust-satisficing approach to derive robust monetary policy when parameters of a macro model are uncertain. There is a trade-off between robustness of policies and their performance. Hence, under uncertainty, the policy maker is assumed to be content with policy performance at...

We study monetary policy under uncertainty. A policy which ameliorates a worst case may differ from a policy which maximizes robustness and satisfices the performance. The former strategy is min-maxing and the latter strategy is robust-satisficing. We show an “observational equivalence”...

Conventional wisdom among environmental economists is that the relative slopes of the marginal social benefit and marginal social cost functions determine whether a price-based or quantity-based environmental regulation leads to higher expected social welfare. We revisit the choice between...

We consider forecasting in systems whose underlying laws are uncertain, while contextual information suggests that future system properties will differ from the past. We consider linear discrete-time systems, and use a non-probabilistic info-gap model to represent uncertainty in the future...