bookbuilding and strategic allocation in the bookbuilding procedure an investment banker solicits bids for shares from institutional investors prior to pricing an equity issue the banker then prices the issue and allocates shares at his discretion to the investors we examine the books for 39 international equity issues we find that the investment banker awards more shares to bidders who provide information in their bids regular investors receive favorable allocations especially when the issue is heavily oversubscribed the investment banker also favors revised bids and domestic investors investment banks commonly build a book before pricing an equity issue in the united states it has been standard practice for a number of years in many other countries where fixed price offerings were traditionally used the bookbuilding procedure is becoming increasingly common especially for international equity issues 1 under the formal bookbuilding procedure the investment banker solicits indications of interest from institutional investors such indications consist of a bid for a quantity of shares and might include a maximum price i e a limit price or other details the investment banker uses the information to construct a demand curve the issue price is not set according to any explicit rule but rather based on the banker s interpretation of investors indications of interest he generally sets the price at a level at which demand exceeds supply and then allocates shares to the bidders at his discretion thus the

discounting and underpricing in seasoned equity offers abstract expected discounting in seasoned equity offers is a cost of uncertainty about firm value marketing new shares and acquiring information that raises the offer price stockholders incorporate predictable discounting in stock prices when equity offers are first announced the surprise component of discounting reflecting the lead bank s final adjustment to the offer price releases information that often causes economically large price swings on the offer day disparities between the issuer s closing price and the price suggested in the lead bank s final order book are a primary source of information the discount surprise appears to be used by lead banks to update capital suppliers with that eleventh hour information before they commit their funds

applications of behavioural economics to tax evasion the paper reviews recent models that have applied the techniques of behavioural economics to the analysis of the tax compliance choice of an individual taxpayer the construction of these models is motivated by the failure of the yitzhaki version of the allingham sandmo model to predict correctly the proportion of taxpayers who will evade and the effect of an increase in the tax rate upon the chosen level of evasion recent approaches have applied non expected utility theory to the compliance decision and have addressed social interaction the models we describe are able to match the observed extent of evasion and correctly predict the tax effect but do not have the parsimony or precision of the yitzhaki model

optimism pessimism and financial bubbles this paper shows that it is possible to extend the scope of the existence of rational bubbles when uncertainty is introduced associated with rank dependent expected utility this rdu assumption can be viewed as a transformation of probabilities depending on the pessimism optimism of the agent the results show that pessimism favors the existence of deterministic bubbles when optimism may promote the existence of stochastic bubbles moreover under pessimism the rdu assumption may generate multiple bubbly equilibria the rdu assumption also leads to new conditions ensuring the absence of pareto optimality of the competitive equilibrium without bubbles these conditions still govern the existence of bubbles

cautious risk takers investor preferences and demand for active management actively managed mutual funds have distinct return distributions from their passive benchmarks and our theoretical analysis using tail sensitive risk preferences suggests that active value and growth funds may serve to reduce downside risk and capture upside potential respectively furthermore tail sensitivity measures estimated from the empirical pricing kernel have significant explanatory power for active fund flows even after controlling for business cycles and market wide sentiment finally active funds unlike their passive counterparts have exposures to option strategies hedging downside risk or capturing upside potential

fair management of social risk we provide a general method for extending social preferences defined for riskless economic environments to the context of risk and uncertainty we apply the method to the problems of managing unemployment allowances in the context of macroeconomic fluctuations and catastrophic risks in the context of climate change the method guarantees ex post fairness and pays attention to individuals risk attitudes while ensuring rationality properties for social preferences revisiting basic ideas from harsanyi s celebrated aggregation theorem harsanyi 1955 the social preferences that we obtain do not always take the form of an expected utility criterion but they always satisfy statewise dominance when we require social preferences to be expected utilities we obtain a variant of harsanyi s result under a weak version of the pareto principle and a maximin criterion under a stronger pareto requirement whenever the ex post social ordering does not depend on people s risk attitudes we also show how non expected utility individual preferences can be accommodated in the approach

bid rigging and the threat of government prosecution in this article i develop a simple bidding model in which collusion is endogenous buyers at a first price sealed bid auction decide whether to rig their bids given that they face the threat of government prosecution a legal authority chooses whether to investigate the buyers on the basis of the bids tendered in the unique sequential equilibrium of the game buyers rig their bids with positive probability but the legal authority can never ascertain on the basis of the bids alone that a conspiracy has formed

home bias in equity portfolios inflation hedging and international capital market equilibrium we test whether the home bias in equity portfolios is caused by investors trying to hedge inflation risk the empirical evidence is consistent with this motive only if investors have very high levels of risk tolerance and equity returns are negatively correlated with domestic inflation we then develop a model of international portfolio choice and equity market equilibrium that integrates inflation risk and deadweight costs using this model we estimate the levels of costs required to generate the observed home bias in portfolios consistent with different levels of risk aversion for a level of risk aversion consistent with standard estimates of the domestic equity market risk premium these costs are about a few percent per annum greater than observable costs such as withholding taxes thus the home bias cannot be explained by either inflation hedging or direct observable costs of international investment unless investors have very low levels of risk aversion article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

asset pricing and dual listing on foreign capital markets a note international capital flows can be hampered by a variety of barriers such as transaction costs information costs and legal restrictions these barriers can be severe enough to produce segmentation of capital markets along national borders thereby producing incentives for firms to adopt financial policies that can effectively reduce the associated negative effects according to stapleton and subrahmanyam 6 p 313 dual listing of the firm s securities on foreign capital markets is one such policy 1 however adoption of this policy will bring forth asset pricing adjustments the purpose of this note is to provide and analyze a closed form solution to the equilibrium asset pricing problem that arises in this situation 2 once the solution is obtained comparative statics are provided 3 the model presented assumes that one of the domestic securities is dually listed on a foreign capital market while none of the foreign securities is dually listed on the domestic capital market this scenario often characterizes the initial stages of capital market integration in which a country with relatively scarce capital or a relatively underdeveloped capital market allows a small number of domestic securities or a fund of domestic securities to be listed on a foreign capital market while simultaneously forbidding its citizens to invest in foreign securities this point can be illustrated by the emergence of a variety of country funds in the u s capital market such as the japan fund in the 1960 s the

bargaining and boldness abstract we study a multiperson bargaining problem with general risk preferences through the use of shaked s game of cycling offers with exogenous breakdown if preferences are smooth then as the risk of breakdown vanishes the limiting outcome is one in which bargainers are equally marginally bold where a bargainer s marginal boldness measures his willingness to risk disagreement in return for a marginal improvement in his position under smoothness any ordinal nash solution is an equally marginally bold outcome however unlike the concept of the ordinal nash solution a unique equally marginally bold outcome exists in natural cases in particular if all bargainers have risk averse preferences of the rank dependent expected utility type for these preferences the equally marginally bold outcome maximizes a bargaining power adjusted asymmetric nash product where the degree of asymmetry is determined by the disparity in the marginal valuation of certainty among bargainers journal of economic literature classification numbers c72 c78 d81

utilitarianism egalitarianism and the timing effect in social choice problems two theorems are derived about social choice functions which are defined on comprehensive convex subsets of utility allocation space theorem 1 asserts that a linearity condition together with pareto optimality implies that a social choice function must be utilitarian theorem 2 asserts that a concavity condition together with pareto optimality and independence of irrelevant alternatives implies that a social choice function must be either utilitarian or egalitarian these linearity and concavity conditions have natural interpretations in terms of the timing of social welfare analysis before or after the resolution of uncertainties and its impact on social choices

foreign equity investment restrictions capital flight and shareholder wealth maximization theory and evidence this article provides a theory of foreign equity investment restrictions we consider a model where the demand function for domestic shares differs between domestic and foreign investors because of deadweight costs in holding domestic and foreign securities that depend on the country of residence of investors we show that domestic entrepreneurs maximize firm value by discriminating between domestic and foreign investors the model implies that countries benefitting from capital flight have binding ownership restrictions such that foreign investors pay a higher price for shares than domestic investors the empirical implications of this theory are supported by evidence from switzerland article published by oxford university press on behalf of the society for financial studies in its journal the review of financial studies

optimal cartel pricing in the presence of an antitrust authority the dynamic behavior of a price fixing cartel is explored when it is concerned about creating suspicions that a cartel has formed consistent with preceding static theories the cartel s steady state price is decreasing in the damage multiple and the probability of detection however contrary to those theories it is independent of the level of fixed fines it is also shown that the cartel prices higher when a more competitive benchmark price is used in calculating damages

the eurobond market and corporate financial policy abstract on average significant positive abnormal returns are associated with eurobond issues during the period 1975 1985 the cross sectional and time series distributions of the abnormal returns are consistent with the hypothesis that impediments to the adjustment of asset supplies to new demand conditions are large enough to create profitable financing opportunities for firms our analysis demonstrates how profitable financing opportunities can persist on the eurobond market and when they are most likely to arise

the probability premium a graphical representation we illustrate that pratt s probability premium can be given a simple graphical representation allowing a direct comparison to the equivalent but more prevalent concept of risk premium under expected utility we also show that the probability premium s graphical representation under the dual theory mimics that of the risk premium under expected utility

a theory of subjective compound lotteries abstract we develop a savage type model of choice under uncertainty in which agents identify uncertain prospects with subjective compound lotteries our theory permits issue preference that is agents may not be indifferent among gambles that yield the same probability distribution if they depend on different issues hence we establish subjective foundations for the anscombe aumann framework and other models with two different types of probabilities we define second order risk as risk that resolves in the first stage of the compound lottery and show that uncertainty aversion implies aversion to second order risk which implies issue preference and behavior consistent with the ellsberg paradox

cumulative prospect theory option returns and the variance premium the variance premium and the pricing of out of the money otm equity index options are major challenges to standard asset pricing models we develop a tractable equilibrium model with cumulative prospect theory cpt preferences that can overcome both challenges the key insight is that the variance premium can be written as the expected return on a portfolio of otm call and put options and the probability weighting feature of cpt can explain the puzzlingly low returns observed for these options using gmm on a sample of u s index option returns between 1996 and 2010 we show that the cpt model ts well observed option prices and therefore the variance premium in a dynamic setting probability weighting and time varying equity return volatility combine to match the observed time series pattern of the variance premium

the nestle crash on november 17 1988 the board of directors of nestle ag decided to allow foreign investors to hold nestle registered stock reversing a longstanding practice this decision had a tremendous impact on the prices of the firm s three classes of common stock as well as on the prices of several other corporations traded on the zurich stock exchange these price changes can be explained by the hypothesis that demand curves slope down

collusion in procurement auctions an experimental examination bart j wilson i introduction questioning the value of efforts to enforce federal anticonspiracy laws raises spirited debate among antitrust economists although everyone recognizes the welfare costs of successful conspiracies commentators such as armentano 1990 and cohen and scheffman 1989 argue that conspiratorial arrangements are pervasively ineffective and thus that social resources spent prosecuting cob lusion are wasted others including marvel et al 1988 express more ambivalence about the seriousness of conspiracies as a social problem but believe that the government manages to detect only the most ineffective arrangements still other economists clearly believe in the effectiveness of current government efforts see e g werden 1989 and froeb et al 1993 ultimately the pervasiveness of conspiratorial behavior and the magnitude of the consequent damages are empirical issues however the illegality of collusion complicates the collection of relevant data tip offs or complaints frequently expose conspiracies but good reasons exist for suspecting that conspiracies detected in this fashion tend to be the least profitable a conspirator likely rats on co conspirators only if he or she is disenchanted with the scheme suggesting that the conspiracy is about to collapse anyway similarly suspect are conspiracies that are sufficiently clumsy to raise the protests of buyers the detection problem would be vastly simplified if conspiracies could be identified in the absence of a smoking gun posner 1969 argues that such explicit evidence of conspiratorial behavior is unnecessary because conspiring firms exhibit identifiable patterns of activity that are alone sufficient to determine illegality kuhlman 1969 and gallo 1977 go still further and advocate the continuous computerized monitoring of pricing and sales data to detect conspiracies however as marshall and muerer 1998 observe a potentially condemning defect of any attempt to detect collusion via behavior is that depending on underlying conditions virtually any suspect pattern of behavior can be generated as a noncollusive nash equilibrium identical prices for example are often cited as an indication of coordinated activity e g mund 1960 1 but in games such as the one modeled by anton and yao 1992 agents submit identical bids in a nash equilibrium in the absence of collusion furthermore some evidence from collusion cases prosecuted by the department of justice suggests that identical prices are rarely part of collusive arrangements except when the industry is not very concentrated comanor and schankerman 1976 market rotations a second pricing scheme that is typically cited as a suspect pattern may also be consistent with a subgame perfect noncooperative nash equilibrium zona 1986 for example identifies a number of approximate equilibria involving contract rotations when sellers have steeply increasing cost structures also lang and rosenthal 1991 characterize a noncooperative static equilibrium for a multiproduct contracting environment where sellers both divide the market and submit noncompetitively high bids in the market where they do not expect to win 2 still other pricing patterns are possibly suspect porter and zona 1993 report evidence of bid rigging in procurement auctions from the pattern of losing bids the intuition is that in a competitive environment bids should be correlated with costs when prices are fixed however this correlation breaks down this article reports a laboratory experiment designed to explore the relationship between suspect behavior and collusion we focus on coordinated behavior in procurement auctions a context where collusion is often suspected and has been frequently observed 4 two environments are examined a set cost regime that contains some features critical to standard government procurement auctions for goods and an endogenous cost regime which exhibits some critical elements of procurement bidding for construction contracts

the impact of global equity offerings this article examines the impact of u s firms issuing equity in multiple markets we compare the stock price reactions to announcements of global equity offers to a control group of issues offered exclusively in the domestic u s market all else equal the adverse price reaction that typically accompanies equity issuance is reduced by 0 8 percent when some shares are sold abroad the overall evidence suggests global offers are effective in expanding demand and reducing the price pressure effects associated with share issuance the benefits of global offers appear to be associated with an increase in the number of foreign shareholders the search for new capital markets and lower costs of capital is an ongoing search for most firms in recent years the number of u s firms issuing common equity in international markets has increased significantly in 1985 u s firms raised 89 million through follow on equity offers in foreign markets and this amount increased to 18 915 million in 1995 a greater than 200 fold increase in nominal terms this paper focuses on follow on global equity issues by u s firms and attempts to assess why firms widely acknowledged to have access to broad and deep domestic capital markets increasingly seek to raise equity abroad the global equity offerings we examine involve a simultaneous sale of common equity at the same offer price in the u s market and one or more international markets we examine the characteristics of the issuers and issues and investigate to what extent the wider distribution of shares affects the pricing and costs of these issues our main line of inquiry examines whether the distribution of shares to multiple markets results in a higher offer price for equity shares than would be obtained had the shares been sold exclusively in the u s market domes

stochastic dominance in regret theory the regret theory of choice under uncertainty is known to admit intransitivities in preference relations in this paper the stochastic dominance properties of the theory are examined it is shown that the usual definition of first stochastic dominance is not satisfied by regret theoretic preferences and that in general violations of first stochastic dominance are not merely permitted but required an exact characterization of the stochastic dominance rule corresponding to regret theoretic preferences is presented this concept is weaker than the usual definition but stronger than the notion of statewise dominance in which one prospect yields a preferred outcome with probability 1 theories of choice under uncertainty have proliferated in recent years after a long period in which the expected utility eu approach of von neumann and morgenstern 1944 was pre eminent the breakdown of the dominance in eu theory reflects the increasing body of evidence that the choices made by many people systematically violate the predictions of the theory the axiomatic foundations of the theory and in particular the independence axiom have also received severe questioning ever since the famous critique of allais 1953

a theory of anticipated utility abstract a new theory of cardinal utility with an associated set of axioms is presented it is a generalization of the von neumann morgenstern expected utility theory which permits the analysis of phenomena associated with the distortion of subjective probability

equality of opportunity and luck definitions and testable conditions with an application to income in france abstract we offer a model of equality of opportunity that encompasses different conceptions expressed in the public and philosophical debates in addition to circumstances whose effect on outcome should be compensated and effort which represents a legitimate source of inequality we introduce a third factor luck that captures the random factors whose impact on outcome should be even handed for equality of opportunity to be satisfied then we analyze how the various definitions of equality of opportunity can be empirically identified given data limitations and provide testable conditions definitions and conditions resort to standard stochastic dominance tools lastly we develop an empirical analysis of equality of opportunity for income acquisition in france over the period 1979 2000 which reveals that the degree of inequality of opportunity tends to decrease and that the degree of risk of income distributions conditional on social origin appears very similar across all groups of social origins

on the measurement of inequality under uncertainty abstract to take into account both ex ante and ex post inequality considerations one has to deal with inequality and uncertainty simultaneously under certainty much of the literature has focused on comonotonically linear indices functionals that are linear on cones of income profiles that agree on the social ranking of the individuals this family generalizes both the gini index and the egalitarian index minimal income however it does not include functionals such as the average of expected gini and gini of expectation in contrast the family of min of means functionals is rich enough for this purpose journal of economic literature classification numbers d31 d63 d81

unequal uncertainties and uncertain inequalities an axiomatic approach abstract in this paper we provide an axiomatic characterization of social welfare functions for uncertain incomes our most general result is that a small number of reasonable assumptions regarding welfare orderings under uncertainty rule out pure ex ante as well as pure ex post evaluations any social welfare function that satisfies these axioms should lie strictly between the ex ante and the ex post evaluations of income distributions we also provide an axiomatic characterization of the weighted average of the minimum and the maximum of ex post and ex ante evaluations

the nash bargaining solution for decision weight utility functions abstract a simple derivation of the non expected utility nash outcome as defined in rubinstein et al 1992 rubinstein a safra z thomson w 1992 on the interpretation of the nash bargaining solution and its extension to non expected utility preferences econometrica 60 1171 1186 is given for the class of decision weight utility functions conditions for existence and uniqueness are provided

the effect of market segmentation and illiquidity on asset prices evidence from exchange listings this article documents the effect on share value of listing on the new york stock exchange and reports the results of a joint test of merton s 1987 investor recognition factor and amihud and mendelson s 1986 liquidity factor as explanations of the change in share value we find that during the 1980s stocks earned abnormal returns of 5 percent in response to the listing announcement and that listing is associated with an increase in the number of shareholders and a reduction in bid ask spreads cross sectional regressions provide support for both investor recognition and liquidity as sources of value from exchange listing the effect on share value of listing on the new york stock exchange nyse by over the counter otc stocks has been the focus of empirical investigation by scholars and practitioners for at least 50 years the consensus conclusion is that an nyse listing is or at least has been associated with a significant increase in share price streetlore has historically attributed this increase in value to the increased investor recognition that is believed to accompany listing on a major exchange until recently this investor recognition explanation has lacked a rigorous analytical foundation merton 1987 fills this void with a model of capital market equilibrium with incomplete information to develop his model merton adopts most of the assumptions of the original sharpe lintner mossin capital asset pricing model capm but relaxes the assumption of equal information across investors he further assumes that investors invest only in the those securities of which they are aware 2 with this modification to the original capm framework merton derives a model in which expected returns increase with systematic risk firm specific risk and relative market value and decrease

two variants of harsanyi s aggregation theorem abstract this paper presents two variants of harsanyi s 1955 utilitarian theorem in which the assumption that the social criterion is an expected value of social welfare is replaced by statewise dominance one variant involves continuity while the other relies on anonymity

household portfolio diversification a case for rank dependent preferences the proliferation of novel preference theories in financial economics is hampered by a lack of non experimental evidence and by the theories additional complexity which has not been shown to be critical in applications in this article i present arguments in support of preferences with rank dependency using the survey of consumer finances data i document two widespread patterns inconsistent with expected utility i many households simultaneously invest in well deversified funds and in poorly diversified portfolios of stocks and ii some households with substantial savings do not invest anything in equities i show that portfolio choice models with rank dependent preferences plausibly parameterized and under fully rational assumptions are quantitatively consistent with the observed diversification these results call for further efforts to integrate the models of rank dependent preferences in portfolio theory and asset pricing the decision theoretic literature has long acknowledged the shortcomings of the expected utility theory of von neumann and morgenstern 1944 several generalizations of the theory are inspired by the experimental evidence and aimed at improving its descriptive accuracy however there are few applications of new models of preferences in finance and expected utility continues to dominate the field 1 two principal hurdles slow the proliferation of novel preferences in financial economics first the lack of empirical non experimental or field data confirming that the behavior motivating non expected utilities is widespread outside the laboratory settings second the additional and often significant complexity of the alternative preferences which has not been shown to be critical in applications where the models based on expected utility fall short of reasonable predictions this article presents empirical and theoretical this paper was previously circulated under the title household portfolio diversification the paper has benefited from the comments of shlomo benartzi luca benzoni markus brunnermeier john dickhaut maria perozek raj singh hersh shefrin and workshop participants at minnesota finance bag lunch 2003 wharton conference household financial decision making and portfolio choice and 2003 summer meetings of econometric society i would like to thank cam harvey the editor and an anonymous referee for many helpful comments and suggestions a special thanks to jack kareken for comments and editorial help on an earlier draft i am grateful to donna zerwitz for editorial assistance the views expressed herein are those of the author and not necessarily of the federal reserve bank of minneapolis or the federal reserve system all errors and omissions are the sole responsibility of the author address correspondence to valery polkovnichenko finance 3 122 csom 319 19 th

cartel pricing dynamics in the presence of an antitrust authority cartel pricing is characterized when firms are concerned about creating suspicions that a cartel has formed balancing concerns about maintaining the stability of the cartel with those of avoiding detection the cartel may either i gradually raise price to its steady state level or ii gradually raise price and then have it decline to its steady state level antitrust laws may have a perverse effect as they make cartel stability easier and thus allow for higher cartel prices

cartel pricing dynamics with cost variability and endogenous buyer detection this paper characterizes collusive pricing patterns when buyers may detect the presence of a cartel buyers are assumed to become suspicious when observed prices are anomalous we find that the cartel price path is comprised of two phases during the transitional phase price is generally rising and relatively unresponsive to cost shocks during the stationary phase price responds to cost but is much less sensitive than under non collusion or simple monopoly the length of the transition phase is decreasing in the variance of cost shocks it is also shown that the cartel price path may overshoot its long run level so that price converges from above

tacit collusion in repeated auctions uniform versus discriminatory within an infinitely repeated game i compare the level and conduct of collusion under uniform and discriminatory auctions for this purpose i characterize the optimal collusive schemes and sets of sustainable profits under these auction formats i show that uniform auctions facilitate collusion more than discriminatory auctions the optimal penal code is equally severe under the two formats but bidders deviation incentives are weaker in uniform auctions given that the payoff irrelevant bids can be used to relax the enforcement problem this discussion is particularly relevant after the recent reforms in the electricity industry in england wales and elsewhere

the social value of mortality risk reduction vsl vs the social welfare function approach we examine how different welfarist frameworks evaluate the social value of mortality risk reduction these frameworks include classical distributively unweighted cost benefit analysis i e the value per statistical life vsl approach and various social welfare functions swfs the swfs are either utilitarian or prioritarian applied to policy choice under risk in either an ex post or ex ante manner we examine the conditions on individual utility and on the swf under which these frameworks display sensitivity to wealth and to baseline risk moreover we discuss whether these frameworks satisfy related properties that have received some attention in the literature namely equal value of risk reduction preference for risk equity and catastrophe aversion we show that the particular manner in which vsl ranks risk reduction measures is not necessarily shared by other welfarist frameworks jel d81 d61 d63 q51

the effects of market segmentation and investor recognition on asset prices evidence from foreign stocks listing in the united states non u s firms cross listing shares on u s exchanges as american depositary receipts earn cumulative abnormal returns of 19 percent during the year before listing and an additional 1 20 percent during the listing week but incur a loss of 14 percent during the year following listing we show how these unusual share price changes are robust to changing market risk exposures and are related to an expansion of the shareholder base and to the amount of capital raised at the time of listing our tests provide support for the market segmentation hypothesis and merton s 1987 investor recognition hypothesis the globalization of u s capital markets has accelerated dramatically in the past decade increasing numbers of companies from overseas have chosen to either raise capital through global equity issues or prepare for future capital raising by way of cross listings on u s exchanges as of 1997 about 1 300 non u s companies have listed their shares for trading on the new york stock exchange nyse the american exchange amex the national association of securities dealers automation quotation nasdaq system or

investor base and corporate borrowing evidence from international bonds abstract we examine international bond issues by us firms to study the benefits of investor taste for cross border security issuances we proxy for firms international investor taste with the fraction of prior international bond holding in firms domestic and international bonds and find that international investor demand increases with such taste moreover the offering yield spreads on international bonds are lower than domestic offering yield spreads for these internationally recognized firms and they have higher probability of issuing internationally such international recognition may occur for instance if the diversification benefits of adding the security to investor s portfolio outweigh the negative effects of higher renegotiation costs for international compared to domestic investors

a controversial proposal concerning inequality measurement abstract an axiom system on a policy maker s preferences is proposed and shown to characterize the class of linear inequality measures a measure for the policy maker s degree of equality mindedness is then developed the essay concludes with an exploration of the interplay between the policy maker s preferences and the prevailing tax structure the controversial aspect lies in an attempt to use the tax structure to retrieve the policy maker s preferences through the principle of equal sacrifice

optimism and pessimism in games this paper considers the impact of ambiguity in strategic situations it extends the earlier literature by allowing for optimistic responses to ambiguity ambiguity is modelled by ceu preferences we propose a new solution concept for players who may express ambiguitypreference then we study comparative statics of changes in ambiguity attitude in games with strategic complements this gives a precise statement of the impact of ambiguity on economic behaviour

sequential sales learning and cascades when ipo shares are sold sequentially later potential investors can learn from the purchasing decisions of earlier investors this can lead rapidly to cascades in which subsequent investors optimally ignore their private information and imitate earlier investors although rationing in this situation gives rise to a winner s curse it is irrelevant the model predicts that 1 offerings succeed or fail rapidly 2 demand can be so elastic that even risk neutral issuers underprice to completely avoid failure 3 issuers with good inside information can price their shares so high that they sometimes fail 4 an underwriter may want to reduce the communication among investors by spreading the selling effort over a more segmented market consider a scenario in which an issuer is selling a new security of uncertain value for example an ipo initial public offering of stock or high yield debt through an underwriter the s e c has banned variable price sales while the value of this new security is highly uncertain to individual market participants investors hold perfectly accurate information when aggregated moreover there are many potential investors and a small number of these investors can jointly determine the value of the firm or its project with high precision it would seem that in this scenario underpriced offerings would succeed and overpriced offerings would fail nevertheless this paper shows that if the distribution channels of invest ment banks are limited underpriced offerings can fail and overpriced offer ings can succeed with limited distribution channels it takes the under writer time to approach interested investors therefore later investors can observe how well an offering has sold to date or at least how successful it has sold relative to offerings previously undertaken by this underwriter

international financial integration through equity markets which firms from which countries go global the authors study international financial integration analyzing firms from various countries raising capital trading equity and cross listing in major world stock markets using a large sample of 39 517 firms from 111 countries covering the period 1989 2000 they find that although international financial integration increases substantially over this period only relatively few countries and firms actively participate in international markets firms more likely to internationalize are from larger and more open economies with higher income better macroeconomic policies and worse institutional environments these firms tend to be larger grow faster and have higher returns and more foreign sales while changes occur with internationalization these firm attributes are present before internationalization takes place the results suggest that international financial integration will likely remain constrained by country and firm characteristics

assessing risky social situations this paper reexamines the welfare economics of risk it singles out a class of criteria the expected equally distributed equivalent as the unique class that avoids serious drawbacks of existing approaches such criteria behave like ex post criteria when the final statistical distribution of well being is known ex ante and like ex ante criteria when risk generates no inequality the paper also provides a new result on the tension between inequality aversion and respect of individual ex ante preferences in the vein of harsanyi s aggregation theorem

attitudes toward catastrophe in light of climate change and other global threats policy commentators sometimes urge that society should be more concerned about catastrophes this paper reflects on what society s attitude toward low probability high impact events is or should be we first argue that catastrophe risk can be conceived of as a spread in the distribution of losses based on this conception we review studies from decision sciences psychology and behavioral economics that explore people s attitudes toward various social risks contray to popular belief we find more evidence against than in favor of catastrophe aversion the preference for a mean preserving contraction of the loss distribution and discuss a number of possible behavioral explanations next we turn to social choice theory and examine how various social welfare functions handle catastrophe risk we explain why catastrophe aversion may be in conflict with equity concerns and other regarding preferences finally we discuss current approaches to evaluate and regulate catastrophe risk

equity and deprivation costs in humanitarian logistics abstract recently essential progress in quantitative modelling of humanitarian operations has been made through the introduction of the deprivation cost concept by holguin veras et al the incorporation of this concept within the overall objective of minimizing the so called social costs logistics costs plus deprivation costs promises to unify the objective functions of optimization models for humanitarian logistics applications although the deprivation cost concept is able to cover the majority of all those optimization criteria previously used in the literature in this field that are not yet covered by logistics costs the question whether it also addresses the criterion of equity fairness remains open in the first part of our work we show by analytical results that minimization of total deprivation cost under a fixed given budget can lead to arbitrarily unfair solutions for this reason we propose to extend the deprivation cost objective by a term proportional to the well known gini inequity index a computational solution procedure for a corresponding logistics model is presented and its merits compared to the utilitarian version are demonstrated at an illustration case with data from the nepal earthquake 2015 in particular it is shown that practically irrelevant final reductions of average deprivation costs result in substantial increases of inequity or vice versa at a low price of fairness dramatic reductions of the gini inequity index can be achieved

portfolio choice in personal equilibrium abstract this paper finds that in portfolio choice where reference point arises endogenously in personal equilibria investors behave as if they had a concave probability weighting function this finding establishes a link between the reference dependent utility and the rank dependent utility theories

stochastic dominance analysis without the independence axiom we characterize the consistency of a large class of nonexpected utility preferences including mean variance preferences and prospect theory preferences with stochastic orders for example stochastic dominances of different degrees our characterization rests on a novel decision theoretic result that provides a behavioral interpretation of the set of all derivatives of the functional representing the decision maker s preferences as an illustration we consider in some detail prospect theory and choice acclimating preferences two popular models of reference dependence under risk and we show the incompatibility of loss aversion with prudence this paper was accepted by james smith decision analysis