We investigate the procedure of "random sampling" where the alternatives are random variables. When comparing any two alternatives, the decision maker samples each of the alternatives once and ranks them according to the comparison between the two realizations. Our main result is that when...

Transitivity is a fundamental requirement for consistency. Legal systems, especially when composed over time and by different agencies, may encounter non-transitive cycles. This paper discusses a new solution to such cycles, namely setting the hierarchy of the relevant rules or preferences. The...

This paper defends the use of asymmetric norms which grant gre- ater privileges to minorities than to majorities. The norms we discuss include norms facilitating the establishment or prohibition of minority- only or majority-only institutions, neighborhoods, or associations. While traditionally...

We show that efficient anonymous incentive compatible (dominant strategy) mechanisms for public goods eliminate externalities, i.e., each individual is unable to change the welfare of anyone else. The characterization is used to derive existence and non-existence results for models with a finite...

Machina (2009, 2012) lists a number of situations where standard models of ambiguity aversion are unable to capture plausible features of ambiguity attitudes. Most of these problems arise in choice over prospects involving three or more outcomes. We show that the recursive non-expected utility...

Preferences may arise from regret, i.e., from comparisons with alternatives forgone by the decision maker. We show that when the choice set consists of pairwise statistically independent lotteries, transitive regret-based behavior is consistent with betweenness preferences and with a family of...

Experimental evidence suggests that individuals who face an asymmetric distribution over the likelihood of a specific event might actually prefer not to know the exact value of this probability. We address these findings by studying a decision maker who has recursive, non-expected utility...

Since Becker (1971), a common argument against asymmetric norms that promote minority rights over those of the majority is that such policies reduce total welfare. While this may be the case, we show that there are simple environments where aggregate sum of individual utilities is actually...

Transitivity is a fundamental axiom in Economics that appears in consumer theory, decision under uncertainty, and social choice theory. While the appeal of transitivity is obvious, observed choices sometimes contradict it. This paper shows that treatments of violations of transitivity al- ready...

Preferences may arise from regret, i.e., from comparisons with alternatives forgone by the decision maker. We ask whether regret-based behavior is consistent with non-expected utility theories of transitive choice. We show that the answer is no. If choices are governed by ex ante regret and...