This paper establishes that the optimal stopping time of virtually any optimal stopping problem is increasing in patience, understood as a particular partial order on discount rate functions. With Markov dynamics, the result holds in a continuation- domain sense even if stopping is combined with...

A common theme in the theory of demand aggregation is that market demand can acquire properties which are not always individually present among the agents who make up that market, a phenomenon we call heteroiosis in this paper. This paper focusses on the well known result that with a suitable...

We carry out a revealed preference analysis of monotone comparative statics. We ask what restrictions on an agent's observed choice behavior are necessary and sufficient to rationalize the data with a preference guaranteeing that choices are always monotone with re- spect to a parameter. We...

How do discount rates affect agents’ decisions and valuations? This paper provides a general method to analyze this question, allowing stochastic and managed cash flows, stochastic discount rates, and time inconsistency and including arbitrary learning and payoff or utility processes. We show...

We develop a nonparametric procedure, called the lattice method, for testing the consistency of contingent consumption data with a broad class of models of choice under risk and under uncertainty. Our method allows for risk loving and elation seeking behavior and can be used to calculate, via...

Certain problems in comparative statics, including (but not exclusively) certain problems in consumer theory, cannot be easily addressed by the methods of lattice programming. One reason for this is that there is no order on the choice space which orders choices in a way which conforms with the...

This note determines the precise connection between an agent's attitude towards income risks and his attitude over risks in the underlying consumption space. Our results follow a general mathematical theory connecting the curvature properties of an objective function with the ray-curvature...