Patient preferences have a social welfare interpretation consonant with a belief that the society affected by present decisions will last for a very long time. In stochastic settings, these preferences lead to justifications for variants of the precautionary principle.

Abstract. In many economic, political and social situations, circumstances change at random points in time, reacting is costly, and reactions appropri- ate to present circumstances may become inappropriate upon future changes, requiring further costly reaction. Waiting is informative if arrival...

Certifiers have a crucial role in facilitating effective communication in the online and the traditional world. As a way of generating statistically meaningful information, certification has been adopted in financial statements evaluation and more recently in various online communities as well....

This dissertation consists of three essays that apply both economic theory and econometric methods to understand design and dynamics of institutions. In particular, it studies how institutions aggregate information and deal with uncertainty and attempts to derive implications for optimal...

We designed a platform with a betting mechanism for eliciting costly, dispersed information of different quality. Our objective is to elicit both dispersed information and the precision of the information so as to efficiently weight dispersed information to produce reliable forecasts. After...

Contemporary tests for structural change are designed to detect a structural break within a given historical data set of fixed size. Due to the law of the iterated logarithm, these one-shot tests cannot be applied to monitor out-of-sample stability each time new data arrive. The authors propose...

We develop a counterterrorism model to analyze the effects of allowing a government agency to torture suspects when evidence of terrorist involvement is strong. We find that legalizing torture in strong-evidence cases has offsetting effects on agency incentives to counter terrorism by means...