Dynamic Preference for Flexibility

We consider a decision maker who faces dynamic decision situations that involve intertemporal trade‐offs, as in consumption–savings problems, and who experiences taste shocks that are transient contingent on the state of the world. We axiomatize a recursive representation of choice over state contingent infinite horizon consumption problems, where uncertainty about consumption utilities depends on the observable state and the state follows a subjective Markov process. The parameters of the representation are the subjective process that governs the evolution of beliefs over consumption utilities and the discount factor; they are uniquely identified from behavior. We characterize a natural notion of greater preference for flexibility in terms of a dilation of beliefs. An important special case of our representation is a recursive version of the Anscombe–Aumann model with parameters that include a subjective Markov process over states and state‐dependent utilities, all of which are uniquely identified.     

Condorcet's jury theorem in light of de Finetti's theorem

This paper generalizes Condorcet's jury theorem to the case of symmetrically dependent votes with the help of de Finetti's theorem. Thus, the paper relaxes Condorcet's assumption of independent voting while preserving his main result: In jury-type situations a majority of voters is more likely than any single voter to choose the better of two alternatives.I am indebted to Professors Steven Brams, Arnold Buss, Gary Miller and Norman Schofield for their comments and questions. This paper is supported, in part, by a grant from the National Science Foundation (SES-9210800).     

Laws of large numbers for bootstrappedU-statistics

For the bootstrapped mean, a strong law of large numbers is obtained under the assumption of finiteness of the rth moment, for some r>1, and a weak law of large numbers is obtained under the finiteness of the first moment. The results are then extended to bootstrapped U-statistics under parallel conditions. Stochastic convergence of the jackknifed estimator of the variance of a bootstrapped U-statistic is proved. The asymptotic normality of the bootstrapped pivot and the bias of the bootstrapped U-statistic are indicated.     

Propagation of Individual Bias through Group Judgment: Error in the Treatment of Asymmetrically Informative Signals

Journal of Risk and Uncertainty - Group decision making is commonly used in juries, businesses, and in politics to increase the informational basis for a decision and to improve judgment accuracy....     

Index-number tests and the common-scaling social cost-of-living index

For a change in prices, the common-scaling social cost-of-living index is the equal scaling of each individual’s expenditure level needed to restore the level of social welfare to its pre-change value. This index does not, in general, satisfy two standard index-number tests. The reversal test requires the index value for the reverse change to be the reciprocal of the original index. And the circular test requires the product of index values for successive price changes to be equal to the index value for the whole change. We show that both tests are satisfied if and only if the Bergson–Samuelson indirect social-welfare function is homothetic in prices, a condition which does not require individual preferences to be homothetic. If individual preferences are homothetic, however, stronger conditions on the Bergson–Samuelson indirect must be satisfied. Given these results, we ask whether the restrictions are empirically reasonable and find, in the case that individual preferences are not homothetic, that they make little difference to estimates of the index.     

Prevention of Child Sexual Abuse by Targeting Pre-Offenders Before First Offense

The population of potential child abuse offenders has largely been unstudied. In the current study, we examine whether a six-component model used for primary diabetes prevention could be adapted to child sexual abuse pre-offenders, whereby individuals who are prone to sexual abuse but have not yet committed an offense can be prevented from committing a first offense. The six components include: define and track the magnitude of the problem, delineate a well-established risk factor profile so that at-risk persons can be identified, define valid screening tests to correctly rule in those with the disease and rule out those without disease, test effectiveness of interventions—the Dunkelfeld Project is an example, produce and disseminate reliable outcome data so that widespread application can be justified, and establish a system for continuous improvement. By using the diabetes primary prevention model as a model, the number of victims of child sexual abuse might be diminished.     

Understanding the differences between climate change deniers and believers’ knowledge,media use,and trust in related information sources

The purpose of this study was to understand the similarities and differences between climate change deniers and believers’ knowledge, news media consumption, and trust in related information sources. Using surveys conducted among 310 climate change-denying American adults, and 337 climate change believers, this study investigated these points with a few surprising results. As expected, climate change deniers displayed significantly lower levels of trust in the scientific community and the EPA than did climate change believers. Furthermore, commonly noted points of attack used by climate change disinformation efforts were found to have been accepted by climate change deniers, and disturbingly, in some cases by climate change believers as well. Implications for public relations scholars and practitioners are discussed (117 words).