Publications

  1. No Bullying! A playful proof of Brouwer's fixed-point theorem, Journal of Mathematical Economics, October 2018 (with Mark Voorneveld) (Link to publication here).

  2. Asymptotic properties of welfare relations, Economic Theory, Forthcoming (Link to publication here).

  3. A "three-sentence proof" of Hansson's theorem, Economic Theory Bulletin, April 2018 (Link to publication here).

  4. Characterizing lexicographic preferences, Journal of Mathematical Economics, March 2016 (with Mark Voorneveld) (Link to publication here).

Working Papers

Lexicographic Probabilities and Robustness (PDF) (This version: December 2018)

Abstract: We provide an axiomatization of lexicographic conditional probability systems. The main axiom is robustness, which is a weak continuity requirement on preferences. It requires preferences between acts x and y to be robust to (unchanged by) small perturbations in payoffs xω and yω for some state ω. We discuss the relationship between our axiomatization and that of Blume, Brandenburger and Dekel (1991). Assuming a stronger robustness requirement, requiring robustness to perturbations in all states ω, a characterization of state contingent subjective expected utility preferences as in Ancsombe and Aumann (1963) is obtained.

Lexicographic Majority (PDF) (This version: November 2017)

Abstract: We propose a descriptive theory of lexicographic choice, lexicographic majority, where a decision maker's ranking of attributes is not necessarily strict. Thus we allow an agent to assign the same rank to a set of attributes. If a decision maker assigns the same rank to a set of attributes, it is assumed that the simple majority heuristic is used, within the set, to discriminate between pairs of vectors. Our model is general enough to account for intransitive preferences. Moreover, it includes as special cases: pure lexicographic preferences, simple majority preferences and lexicographic semiorders. We justify lexicographic majority preferences by providing an axiomatization in terms of behavioral properties. As a further justification we characterize lexicographic majority preferences as a subset of the class of weighted majority preferences.

Choice by Incomplete Checklist (PDF) (This version: November 2017)

Abstract: A decision maker chooses alternatives from menus by proceeding sequentially through a checklist of properties. In contrast to the standard framework her ranking of properties is not necessarily complete. We characterize the model in terms of observed choices. As another main result of the paper we show that an important special case of our model is exactly equivalent to the maximization of an incomplete preference relation. We also relate the model to the choice model resulting from the maximization of a multi-utility (also called multi-criteria) function. Our results suggest a close relationship between the degree of completeness of the order by which properties in a checklist are looked at, and the degree of completeness of the revealed preference relation maximizing the corresponding choice function.