A survey was carried out among two groups of undergraduate economics students and four groups of students in mathematics, law, philosophy and business administration. The main survey question involved a conflict between profit maximisation and the welfare of the workers who would be fired to achieve it. Significant differences were found between the choices of the groups. The results were reinforced by a survey conducted among readers of an Israeli business newspaper and PhD students of Harvard. It is argued that (...) the overly mathematical methods used to teach economics encourage students to lean towards profit maximisation. (shrink)

A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to take a certain action. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener’s point of view, depend on the state of the world, which is known only to the speaker. Each state is characterized by a set of statements from which the speaker chooses. A persuasion rule specifies which statements the listener finds persuasive. We study persuasion rules that maximize the probability that the listener accepts the request if and only (...) if it is justified, given that the speaker maximizes the probability that his request is accepted. We prove that there always exists a persuasion rule involving no randomization and that all optimal persuasion rules are ex-post optimal. We relate our analysis to the field of pragmatics. (shrink)

p. cm. — (Zeuthen lecture book series) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index. ISBN 0-262-18187-8 (hardcover : alk. paper). — ISBN 0-262-68100-5 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Decision-making. 2. Economic man. 3. Game theory. 4. Rational expectations (Economic theory) I. Title. II. Series.

Western feminists, physicians, and ethicists condemn the traditional genital surgeries performed on women in some non‐Western cultures. But coming to moral judgment is not the end of the story; we must also decide what to do about our judgments. We must learn to work respectfully with, not independently of, local resources for cultural self‐examination and change.

A behavioral dataset contains various preference orderings displayed by the same individual in different payoff-irrelevant circumstances. We introduce a framework for eliciting the individual’s underlying preferences in such cases, in which it is conjectured that the variation in the observed preference orderings is the outcome of some cognitive process that distorts the underlying preferences. We then demonstrate for two cognitive processes how to elicit the individual’s underlying preferences from behavioral datasets.

The paper is a discussion of the interpretation of game theory. Game theory is viewed as an abstract inquiry into the concepts used in social reasoning when dealing with situations of conflict and not as an attempt to predict behavior. The first half of the paper..

In the jungle, power and coercion govern the exchange of resources. We study a simple, stylised model of the jungle that mirrors an exchange economy. We define the notion of jungle equilibrium and demonstrate that a number of standard results of competitive markets hold in the jungle.

We investigate the procedure of "random sampling" where the alternatives are random variables. When comparing any two alternatives, the decision maker samples each of the alternatives once and ranks them according to the comparison between the two realizations. Our main result is that when applied to three alternatives, the procedure yields a cycle with a probability bounded above by 8 27 . Bounds are also obtained for other related procedures.

Despite its widespread existence, the adaptive role of aneuploidy (the abnormal state of having an unequal number of different chromosomes) has been a subject of debate. Cellular aneuploidy has been associated with enhanced resistance to stress, whereas on the organismal level it is detrimental to multicellular species. Certain aneuploid karyotypes are deleterious for specific environments, but karyotype diversity in a population potentiates adaptive evolution. To reconcile these paradoxical observations, this review distinguishes the role of aneuploidy in cellular versus organismal evolution. (...) Further, it proposes a population genetics perspective to examine the behavior of aneuploidy on a populational versus individual level. By altering the copy number of a significant portion of the genome, aneuploidy introduces large phenotypic leaps that enable small cell populations to explore a wide phenotypic landscape, from which adaptive traits can be selected. The production of chromosome number variation can be further increased by stress‐ or mutation‐induced chromosomal instability, fueling rapid cellular adaptation. (shrink)

The paper presents a simple game-theoretic model in which players decide on search procedures for a prize located in one of a set of labeled boxes. The prize is awarded to the player who finds it first. A player can decide on the number of (costly) search units he employs and on the order in which he conducts the search. It is shown that in equilibrium, the players employ an equal number of search units and conduct a completely random search. (...) The paper demonstrates that the search procedure is intrinsically inefficient. Journal of Economic Literature Classification.. (shrink)

This paper does not purport to offer yet another ‘solution’ to the much discussed ‘new riddle’ of induction. The focus, instead, is on the genesis of Goodman's paradox and its relation to the classic problem of induction. In the arguments which led Goodman from the dissolution of Hume's problem to the discovery of the new riddle, I reveal a fundamentally flawed assumption about the nature of inductive inference which undermines Goodman's contention that the genuine problem of induction consists in distinguishing (...) between projectible and non‐projectible regularities. I further show that if the same set of observations may indeed support an indefinitely large number of inductive predictions, then the rationale for dismissing the classic problem of induction disappears. Stripped of its erroneous assumptions, the new riddle becomes nothing more than a special case of Hume's problem. (shrink)

Lecture audiences and students were asked to respond to virtual decision and game situations at gametheory.tau.ac.il. Several thousand observations were collected and the response time for each answer was recorded. There were significant differences in response time across responses. It is suggested that choices made instinctively, that is, on the basis of an emotional response, require less response time than choices that require the use of cognitive reasoning.

Neuroeconomics is examined critically using data on the response times of subjects who were asked to express their preferences in the context of the Allais Paradox. Different patterns of choice are found among the fast and slow responders. This suggests that we try to identify types of economic agents by the time they take to make their choices. Nevertheless, it is argued that it is far from clear if and how neuroeconomics will change economics.

The ability to compare possibilities and designate some as ‘better’ than others is a fundamental aspect of our use of modals and propositional attitude verbs. This article aims to support a proposal by Sloman that certain modal expressions, in particular, ought, in fact have a more pronounced comparative backbone than others . The connection between ‘ought’ and ‘better’ is supported by linguistic data and a proposal is advanced for modeling ideals in a way that makes room for non-comparative, strong, priority-type (...) necessity. (shrink)

We develop a framework for modeling choice in the presence of framing effects. An extended choice function assigns a chosen element to every pair (A, f ) where A is a set of alternatives and f is a frame. A frame includes observable information that is irrelevant in the rational assessment of the alternatives, but nonetheless affects choice. We relate the new framework to the classical model of choice correspondence. Conditions are identified under which there exists either a transitive or (...) a transitive and complete binary relation R such that an alternative x is chosen in some (A, f ) iff x is R-maximal in the set A. We then demonstrate that the framework of choice correspondence misses information, which is essential to economic modeling and which is incorporated in the extended choice function. (shrink)

The standard economic choice model assumes that the decision maker chooses from sets of alternatives. In contrast, we analyze a choice model in which the decision maker encounters the alternatives in the form of a list. We present two axioms similar in nature to the classical axioms of choice from sets. We show that they characterize all the choice functions from lists that involve the choice of either the first or the last optimal alternative in the list according to some (...) preference relation. We then relate choice functions from lists to the classical notions of choice correspondences and random choice functions. (shrink)

The determination of “who is a J” within a society is treated as an aggregation of the views of the members of the society regarding this question. Methods, similar to those used in Social Choice theory are applied to axiomatize three criteria for determining who is a J: 1) a J is whoever defines oneself to be a J. 2) a J is whoever a “dictator” determines is a J. 3) a J is whoever an “oligarchy” of individuals agrees is (...) a J. (shrink)

Arising out of the author's lifetime fascination with the links between the formal language of mathematical models and natural language, this short book comprises five essays investigating both the economics of language and the language of economics. Ariel Rubinstein touches the structure imposed on binary relations in daily language, the evolutionary development of the meaning of words, game-theoretical considerations of pragmatics, the language of economic agents and the rhetoric of game theory. These short essays are full of challenging ideas (...) for social scientists that should help to encourage a fundamental rethinking of many of the underlying assumptions in economic theory and game theory. As a postscript two economists, Tilman Borgers and Bart Lipman, and a logician, Johan van Benthem offer comments. (shrink)

The paper springs from a position that economic theory is an abstract investigation of the concepts and considerations involved in real life economic decision making rather than a tool for predicting or describing real behavior. It is argued that when experimental economics is motivated by theory, it should not look to verify the predictions of theory but instead should focus on verifying that the considerations contained in the economic model are sound and in common use. It is argued that when (...) theory is motivated by experiments, the theorist should not be hasty in adopting new functional forms but should try to identify the basic psychological themes which are revealed exposed by the experiment. Finally, some critical comments on the methodology of experimental economics are presented. 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved. (shrink)

A speaker wishes to persuade a listener to accept a certain request. The conditions under which the request is justified, from the listener’s point of view, depend on the values of two aspects. The values of the aspects are known only to the speaker and the listener can check the value of at most one. A mechanism specifies a set of messages that the speaker can send and a rule that determines the listener’s response, namely, which aspect he checks and (...) whether he accepts or rejects the speaker’s request. We study mechanisms that maximize the probability that the listener accepts the request when it is justified and rejects the request when it is unjustified, given that the speaker maximizes the probability that his request is accepted. We show that a simple optimal mechanism exists and can be found by solving a linear programming problem in which the set of constraints is derived from what we call the L-principle. (shrink)

(2) Mental preferences: These describe the mental attitude of an individual toward the objects. They can be defined in contexts which do not involve actual choice. In particular, preferences can describe tastes (such as a preference for one season over another) or can refer to situations which are only hypothetical (such as the possible courses of action available to an individual were he to become Emperor of Rome) or which the individual does not fully control (such as a game situation (...) in which a player has preferences over the entire set of outcomes). (shrink)

Among the hidden treasures squirreled away in the archives of Israel’s National Library lies a fragmented correspondence that sheds new light on the afterlife of a project that was long deemed the farewell gift to the German language and culture from the remnants of its Jewry. It is an exchange of letters between two scholars, whose interest in the German rendition of the Bible occupied them for many years, first in Germany, and later in the land where Hebrew was vernacular (...) and where one might think there would no longer be a need for translations of the Bible; particularly not into a language that aroused considerable aversion in the aftermath of the war. And yet, the 1963–64 exchange between the two Jerusalemites, the Vienna-born and Frankfurt-crowned philosopher, theologian, and translator Martin Buber and the Riga-born, Berlin- and Marburg-educated biblical scholar Nechama Leibowitz tells a different story. It shows they both believed the project that began under the title Die Schrift, zu verdeutschen unternommen should be revised once again, after its completion so as to underline its ongoing relevance for present and future readings of the Bible tout court, in German and Hebrew speaking lands alike. (shrink)

We suggest an equilibrium concept for a strategic model with a large number of players in which each player observes the actions of only a small number of the other players. The concept fits well situations in which each player treats his sample as a prediction of the distribution of actions in the entire population, and responds optimally to this prediction. We apply the concept to a strategic voting model and investigate the conditions under which a centrist candidate can win (...) the popular vote although his strength in the population is smaller than the strengths of the right and left candidates.  2003 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. (shrink)

This book presents Ariel Rubinstein's lecture notes for the first part of his well-known graduate course in microeconomics.

We show that for solvable games, the calculation of the strategies which survive iterative elimination of dominated strategies in normal games is equivalent to the calculation of the backward induction outcome of some extensive game. However, whereas the normal game form does not provide information on how to carry out the elimination, the corresponding extensive game does. As a by-product, we conclude that implementation using a subgame perfect equilibrium of an extensive game with perfect information is equivalent to implementation through (...) a solution concept which we call guided iteratively elimination of dominated strategies which requires a uniform order of elimination. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Number: C72. (shrink)

A number of experts receive noisy signals regarding a desirable public decision. The public target is to make the best possible decision on the basis of all the information held by the experts. We compare two ``cultures.'' In one, all experts are driven only by the public motive to increase the probability that the desirable action will be taken. In the second, each expert is also driven by a private motive: to have his recommendation accepted. We show that in the (...) first culture, every mechanism will have an equilibrium which does not achieve the public target, whereas the second culture gives rise to a mechanism whose unique equilibrium outcome does achieve the public target. Journal of Economic Literature Classification Numbers: C72, D71. (shrink)

This paper is an examination of some modelling problems regarding imperfect recall within the model of extensive games. It is argued that, if the assumption of perfect recall is violated, care must be taken in interpreting the main elements of the model. Interpretations that are inconsequential under perfect recall have important implications in the analysis of games with imperfect recall.