In their seminal work, The Calculus of Consent (1962), Buchanan and Tullock develop a decision model which embodies fundamental relation­ships relevant to institutional choices. However, the Buchanan-Tullock model remains "general," thus inviting others to specify details and to develop...

This study reports an experiment that examines whether groups can better comply with theoretical predictions than individuals in contests. Our experiment replicates previous findings that individual players significantly overbid relative to theoretical predictions, incurring substantial losses....

Better forecasts of decisions in conflict situations, such as occur in business, politics, and war, can help protagonists achieve better outcomes. It is common advice to “stand in the other person’s shoes” when involved in a conflict, a procedure we refer to as “role thinking.” We...

In this paper I shall introduce a new method by which it is possible to study the dynamical decision maker's behaviour. It can be tought of as an application of the S -Linear Algebra of Professor David Carfì, thus this theory it is assumed to be known. I shall focus on the Feynman's propagator...

Morris (1996, 1997) introduced preference-based definitions of knowledge of belief in standard state-space structures. This paper extends this preference-based approach to unawareness structures (Heifetz, Meier, and Schipper, 2006, 2008). By defining unawareness and knowledge in terms of...

This article offers an approach to the general structure of the rhetoric in economy. In our case we adopted a perspective to study a particular aspect of the rhetoric that comes from the context of a particular controversy: the controversy on the advantages of the free commerce between Daly and...

Orthodox decision theory gives no advice to agents who hold two goods to be incommensurate in value because such agents will have incomplete preferences. According to standard treatments, rationality requires complete preferences, so such agents are irrational. Experience shows, however, that...

Motivated by a real-life situation, we put forward a model and then derive an optimal strategy that maximizes the expected real-estate selling price when one of the only two remaining buyers has already made an offer but the other one is yet to make. Since the seller is not sure whether the...

When we face a decision matter we do not face a frozen-time where all keep still while we are making a decision, but the time goes by and the probability distribution keeps moving by new available information. In this paper I want to build up the mathematical framework of a special kind of...

This study establishes necessary conditions for Almost Stochastic Dominance criteria of various orders. These conditions take the form of restrictions on algebraic combinations of moments of the probability distributions in question. The relevant set of conditions depends on the relevant order...