The relationships among the Hamiltonian, NNP, and the level of sustainable consumption/utility have been widely misunderstood. This paper dispels the misconceptions and provides further new insight into these relationships. We show generally that for autonomous dynamic optimizing economies, a...

This paper sheds further light on the relationships between the current-value Hamiltonian, net national product (NNP), and sustainability condition in the context of a cake-eating economy. It shows that the usual interpretation of the current-value Hamiltonian as the maximum sustainable...

We extend the Rothschild and Stiglitz (1970, 1971) notion of increasing risk to families of random variables and in this way link their approach to the concept of stochastic processes which are increasing in the convex order. These processes have been introduced in seminal work by Strassen...

In the real world many social and economic decisions have to be made with imperfect information and uncertainty. In the past two decades, economists and mathematicians have devoted a great deal of time and effort into the study of ambiguity and much progress has been made in modeling ambiguity....

How does a private market influence the optimal design of a public program? In this paper, I study a designer who has preferences over how a public option and a private good are allocated. However, she can design only the public option. Her design affects the distribution of consumers who...

Behavioral (e.g. consumption) patterns of boundedly rational agents can lead these agents into learning dynamics that appear to be "wasteful" in terms of well-being or welfare. Within settings displaying preference endogeneity, it is however still unclear how to conceptualize well-being. This...

We solve the problem of a social planner who seeks to minimize inequality via transfers with a fixed public budget in a distribution of exogenously given incomes. The appropriate solution method depends on the objective function: If it is convex, as in the case of the absolute mean deviation, it...