守望与漂流——卡夫卡“毁稿遗嘱”论

卡夫卡的"毁稿遗嘱"及其围绕它所展开的"诉讼"似乎给人一种错觉作为一个视文学为自己生命形式的作家,他一点都不关心甚至不求自己作品的面世.事实真是如此吗?他与布罗德的友谊到底是怎么回事?他都否定了自己的哪些作品?从"形而下"的角度,阻碍他发表作品的原因到底有哪些?诸如此类的问题需要我们重新清理.     

Lorenz non-consistent welfare and inequality measurement

Typical welfare and inequality measures are required to be Lorenz consistent which guarantees that inequality decreases and welfare increases as a result of a progressive transfer. We explore the implications for welfare and inequality measurement of substituting the weaker absolute differentials and deprivation quasi-orderings for the Lorenz quasi-ordering. Restricting attention to distributions of equal means, we show that the utilitarian model - the so-called expected utility model in the theory of risk - does not permit one to make a distinction between the views embedded in the differentials, deprivation and Lorenz quasi-orderings. In contrast it is possible within the dual model of M. Yaari (Econometrica 55 (1987), 99–115) to derive the restrictions to be placed on the weighting function which guarantee that the corresponding welfare orderings are consistent with the differentials and deprivation quasi-orderings respectively. Finally we drop the equal mean condition and indicate the implications of our approach for the absolute ethical inequality indices.     

How Many Balance Functions Does it Take to Determine a Utility Function?

Call b your balance function at wealth W if you are indifferent between W and a 50–50 lottery with outcomes x and b(x). Given one b, u is arbitrary on one side of W but then determined on the other. Given two b‘s, u is arbitrary between the two W′ s but then determined elsewhere. Additional properties of u restrict the b’s but do not ordinarily make u unique. Contradictions can occur. Given three b′ s, an algorithm is developed using minimal domains of definition that determines the relative utility of the W’s. If it is irrational, then the set S generated by applying all combinations of b’s to W′ s is dense and u is determined. If finitely many b’s are rationally related, then S is discrete, a further algorithm determines it, the values of u on S are equally spaced, and u is arbitrary between any two adjacent points of S but then determined elsewhere. Infinitely many balance functions determine u unless they are rationally related in a uniform way.JEL Classification: D81     

An Empirical Investigation of the Assumptions of Risk-Value Models

Do participants make decisions consistent with risk-value tradeoffs? One hundred and five undergraduate business students made risk and preference judgments about lottery pairs in a series of paper surveys. The data indicate that the participants’ responses were generally consistent with the key assumptions of risk-value models, but that some extensions of the theory would improve this consistency. In particular, we find that modifying the risk assumptions of the risk-value theory so they are consistent the concept of the reflection of the risk attitude in the domains of gains and losses increases the agreement between the theory and the participants’ responses.     

A Note on the Portfolio Selection Problem

In this note we provide new results of interest in the portfolio choice problem when the risky opportunities are correlated: for a general vector (X₁, X₂,..., X_n) of risky opportunities we give new conditions for stochastic comparison among different portfolios choices and new necessary and sufficient conditions to characterize the portfolio which gives the maximal expected utility.     

On the nonexistence of Blackwell's theorem-type results with general preference relations

A well-known theorem of Blackwell states that, when quantity of information is properly defined, every expected utility decision maker prefers more information to less; for more general preferences, however, the theorem is no longer true. In this article, we investigate the extent to which Blackwell's Theorem does not hold and describe conditions, and situations, under which information is still valuable. We also show that, for many types of additions of information, there exists a decision maker who will reject this information.We thank Niv Ahituv, Larry Epstein, Uzi Segal, and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments. This article was partially financed by the Israel Institute of Business Research.     

沈从文文学观念简评

本文对沈从文文学观念的几个方面,即"生命"美学观、"文学自由"论和文学功利观作了简要概括,并在现代文学理论史的背景上对其文学观念进行了一定的评价。在此基础上分析指出沈从文的文学观念同"改造民族灵魂"的基本文学观念的一致性,以及在"湘西价值"坚守下的独特性,从中探索沈从文对现代文学理论创作的启发意义和深远影响。     

价格的决定因素

本文通过对价格与效用的关系论述,提出商品价格的最终决定因素是商品的效用,商品的效用越大,则商品的价格越高.同时,通过引入效用函数,推导出了边际效用与价格之间的关系,从数学方面证明了价格与效用之间存在着正向比例关系.并籍此认为,西方效用论的谬误之处在于将价格与价值的概念混为一谈.     

Coherent Frequentism: A Decision Theory Based on Confidence Sets

By representing fair betting odds according to one or more pairs of confidence set estimators, dual parameter distributions called confidence posteriors secure the coherence of actions without any prior distribution. This theory reduces to the maximization of expected utility when the pair of posteriors is induced by an exact or approximate confidence set estimator or when a reduction rule is applied to the pair. Unlike the p-value, the confidence posterior probability of an interval hypothesis is suitable as an estimator of the indicator of hypothesis truth since it converges to 1 if the hypothesis is true or to 0 otherwise.     

Practical bayesian approaches to the analystcs of a 2×2 contingency table with incompletely categorized data

To assess the efficacy of a treatment, patients are administered a pre-test, the treatment, and a post-test (identical to the pre-test). These patients are then categorized according to their outcomes observed on both tests,e.g., (S,S), (S,F), etc. Also, we observe "incomplete" information on the pre-tests' outcomes for some patients and the results of only the post-test being known for thers, A Bayesian framework is fit to the problem and Bayes factors, posterior odds ratios, and utility functions are given to evaluate th e treatment, A method of assessing the prior distribution is specified and a numerical example is worked.