Environmental, health, and safety advocates, say Richard Revesz and Michael Livermore, have been wrongly hostile to cost-benefit analysis because of a false belief that it is biased against regulation. The bias against regulation, while real, has been the artifact of historical accident - the...

The transferable utility hypothesis underlies important theoretical results in household economics. We provide a revealed preference framework for bringing this (theoretically appealing) hypothesis to observational data. We establish revealed preference conditions that must be satisfied for...

In 1908 the Welsh neurologist and psychoanlayst Ernest Jones described human beings as rationalizers whose behavior is governed by "the necessity of providing an explanation." We construct a formal and testable model of rationalization in which a decision maker selects her preferred alternative...

When is a finite number of binary voting choices consistent with the hypothesis that the voter has preferences that admit a (quasi)concave utility representation? I derive necessary and sufficient conditions and a tractable algorithm to verify their validity. I show that the hypothesis that the...