Travailler ou ne pas travailler: la motivation professionnelle autre que pécuniaire et ses prédicteurs,une question d'époque

Pour mesurer la motivation professionnelle autre que pécuniaire, on demande généralement aux gens s'ils continueraient à travailler s'ils gagnaient au loto. Les auteurs rappellent les conclusions des études menées sur la base des réponses à cette question dans différents pays dont Israël, tout en recherchant l'influence en la matière des variables démographiques et des différentes dimensions du sens du travail. Ils constatent un net recul de la motivation professionnelle autre que pécuniaire au nouveau millénaire, et une évolution des facteurs en cause. Ils analysent ces résultats et leurs effets potentiels sur le travail et l'emploi au regard de l'évolution économique et sociale en Israël.     

Subjective Distributions

A decision maker has to choose one of several random variables whose distributions are not known. As a Bayesian, she behaves as if she knew the distributions. In this paper we suggest an axiomatic derivation of these (subjective) distributions, which is more economical than the derivations by de Finetti or Savage. Whereas the latter derive the whole joint distribution of all the available random variables, our approach derives only the marginal distributions. Correspondingly, the preference questionnaire needed in our case is less smaller.     

Majority vote following a debate

Voters determine their preferences over alternatives based on cases (or arguments) that are raised in the public debate. Each voter is characterized by a matrix, measuring how much support each case lends to each alternative, and her ranking is additive in cases. We show that the majority vote in such a society can be any function from sets of cases to binary relations over alternatives. A similar result holds for voting with quota in the case of two alternatives.We wish to thank Enriqueta Aragones, Jean-Francois Laslier, Andrew Postlewaite, and David Schmeidler for the comments and discussions. We thank Lada Burde for her help in proofreading.     

Sharing beliefs and the absence of betting in the Choquet expected utility model

Choquet expected utility maximizers tend to behave in a more “cautious” way than Bayesian agents, i. e. expected utility maximizers. We illustrate this phenomenon in the particular case of betting behavior. Specifically, consider agents who are Choquet expected utility maximizers. Then, if the economy is large, Pareto optimal allocations provide full insurance if and only if the agents share at least on prior, i. e., if the intersection of the core of the capacities representing their beliefs is non empty. In the expected utility case, this is true only if they have a common prior. Received: July 2000; revised version: May 2001     

Inductive Inference: An Axiomatic Approach

A predictor is asked to rank eventualities according to their plausibility, based on past cases. We assume that she can form a ranking given any memory that consists of finitely many past cases. Mild consistency requirements on these rankings imply that they have a numerical representation via a matrix assigning numbers to eventuality–case pairs, as follows. Given a memory, each eventuality is ranked according to the sum of the numbers in its row, over cases in memory. The number attached to an eventuality–case pair can be interpreted as the degree of support that the past case lends to the plausibility of the eventuality. Special instances of this result may be viewed as axiomatizing kernel methods for estimation of densities and for classification problems. Interpreting the same result for rankings of theories or hypotheses, rather than of specific eventualities, it is shown that one may ascribe to the predictor subjective conditional probabilities of cases given theories, such that her rankings of theories agree with rankings by the likelihood functions.     

The covariance structure of sequential forecasts obtained by regression analysis

A method is presented for evaluating the covariance matrix of a set of sequential forecasts obtained by regression analysis. The matrix can be used to derive the relation between the variance of the forecasts on the one hand, and the lead times between the forecasting time and the time at which the forecasted variables are realized, on the other hand. The determination of this relation is important whenever the optimal frequency of forecasting must be determined.     

Probabilities as Similarity‐Weighted Frequencies

A decision maker is asked to express her beliefs by assigning probabilities to certain possible states. We focus on the relationship between her database and her beliefs. We show that if beliefs given a union of two databases are a convex combination of beliefs given each of the databases, the belief formation process follows a simple formula: beliefs are a similarity‐weighted average of the beliefs induced by each past case.     

No-betting Pareto under ambiguity

It has been argued that Pareto-improving trade is not as compelling under uncertainty as it is under certainty. The former may involve agents with different beliefs, who might wish to execute trades that are no more than betting. In response, the concept of no-betting Pareto dominance was introduced, requiring that putative Pareto improvements must be rationalizable by some common probabilities, even though the participants’ beliefs may differ. In this paper, we argue that this definition might be too narrow for use when agents are not Bayesian. Agents who face ambiguity might wish to trade in ways that can be justified by common ambiguity, though not necessarily by common probabilities. We accordingly extend the notion of no-betting Pareto dominance to characterize trades than are “no-betting Pareto” ranked according to the maxmin expected utility model.