This paper contains an analysis of a simple principal-agent problem illustrating possible problems that arise when the principal ascribes to the agent subjective probabilities and utilities that are implied by the subjective expected utility model but do not represent the agent's beliefs and...

Unemployment insurance improves the allocation of risk bearing at the cost of reduced incentives for work. In the past two decades, a branch of the literature has emerged that deals with the optimal design of unemployment insurance. This literature has been influenced by ideas and methods from...

This article generalizes Savage's theory to include event-dependent preferences. The state space is partitioned into finitely many events. The induced.preferences over consequences are assumed independent of the underlying states within, but not across, these events. This results in an...

This paper reviews some of the recent developments in the theory of decision making under risk and apply them to selected problems in the theory of optimal insurance, namely, the choice of optimal insurance coverage, and the comparative statics analysis of the optimal insurance coverage with...

Invoking the parameterized distribution formulation of agency theory, the paper develops axiomatic foundations of the principal's and agent's choice behaviors that are representable by the maximization of the minimum expected utility over action-dependent sets of priors. In the context of this...