Analyses of risk-bearing often assume that agents face only one risk. Agents however usually face several risks and the interaction between them can affect the willingness to bear any one of them. We consider how the introduction of background risk affects the comparative statics predictions of...

We consider the effect of information on the average risk-free rate and the average equity premium in a standard two-period exchange economy with complete markets and a representative agent. We show that information always increases the average risk-free rate. Clearly, perfect information...

A well-known property of expected utility theory is that the value of information is nonnegative. Given the widespread dissatisfaction with the expected utility hypothesis, a natural question to ask is whether competing theories of choice preserve this property. This article considers one widely...

Willig (1976) argues that the change in consumerís surplus is often a good approximation to the willingness to pay for a price change: if the income elasticity of demand is small, or the price change is small, then the percentage error from using consumerís surplus is small. If the price of a...

Analyses of risk-bearing often assume that agents face only one risk when deciding how much risk to bear. Agents however usually face several risks at the same time and the interaction between risks can affect the willingness to bear any particular one of them. We consider how the introduction...

Willig (1976) argues that the change in consumer's surplus is often a good approximation to the willingness to pay for a price change: if the income elasticity of demand is small, or the price change is small, then the percentage error from using consumer's surplus is small. If the price of a...

The equivalent or compensating variation for a price increase is often calculated using the expenditure function from a statistical (i.e. estimated) demand. If the regression errors are due to unobserved heterogeneity, then the variation from the statistical demand does not generally equal the...