Simon Grant and John Quiggin argue that taking the equity premium seriously—-the well-known fact that the average annual historical return of stocks is seven times that of government bonds and other debt-—has many implications, the most robust of which is that recessions are extremely costly...

In most previous work on strategic trade policy, the form of government intervention has been prescribed in advance. In this paper, the authors apply a solution concept discussed by P. D. Klemperer and M. A. Meyer (1989) for games in which the strategy space consists of the class of all...

We formulate a dynamic framework for an individual decision-maker within which discovery of previously unconsidered propositions is possible. Using a standard game-theoretic representation of the state space as a tree structure generated by the actions of agents (including acts of nature), we...

We present a definition of increasing uncertainty, in which an elementary increase in the uncertainty of any act corresponds to the addition of an `elementary bet' that increases consumption by a fixed amount in (relatively) `good' states and decreases consumption by a fixed (and possibly...

Abstract: The precautionary principle has been proposed as a basis for making decisions about envi- ronmental issues but remains controversial. Using a model of inductively justified propositions about awareness, this paper shows how the precautionary principle may be interpreted as a heuristic...

We develop a model of games with awareness that allows for differential levels of awareness. We show that, for the standard modal-logical interpretations of belief and awareness, a player cannot believe there exist propositions of which he is unaware. Nevertheless, we argue that a boundedly...

We consider the optimality of liquidated damages contracts in a setting of contractual ambiguity and potential for disputes. We show that when parties are ambiguity averse enough, they will optimally choose liquidated damages contracts and sacrifice risk sharing opportunities.

We consider conditions under which the representation of the world available to a boundedly rational decision-maker, whose awareness in- creases over time, constitutes an adequate `small world' (in the sense of Savage 1954) for the assessment of a given decision. Equivalently, we consider...

We present a formal treatment of contracting in the face of ambiguity. The central idea is that boundedly rational individuals will not always interpret the same situation in the same way. More specifically, even with well defined contracts, the precise actions to be taken by each party to the...

We focus on syntactic aspects of differential awareness that give rise to contractual disputes. Boundedly rational parties use a common language, but do not share a common understanding of the world, leading to ambiguity in both syntactic and semantic forms. In contractual relationships,...