Trends in steam generator designs for electric utility and indus trial applications

UANL

The fearsome island, being a modern rendering of the narrative ofone Seld Fordred, master marines of Hythe, whose shipwreck and subsequent adventures are herein set forth...

UANL

Core Retionalizability in Two-Agent Exchange Economies.

We provide a characterization of selection correspondences in two-person exchange economies that can be core rationalized in the sense that there exists a preference profile with some standard properties that generates the observed choices as the set of core elements of the economy for any given initial endowment vector. The approach followed in this paper deviates from the standard rational choice model in that a rationalization in terms of a profile of individual orderings rather than in terms of a single individual or social preference relation is analyzed.

Ranking Sets of Objects

We provide a survey of the literature on ranking sets of objects. The interpretations of those set rankings include those employed in the theory of choice under complete uncertainty, rankings of opportunity sets, set rankings that appear in matching theory, and the structure of assembly preferences. The survey is prepared for the Handbook of Utility Theory, vol. 2, edited by Salvador Barberà, Peter Hammond, and Christian Seidl, to be published by Kluwer Academic Publishers. The chapter number is provisional.

Rationalizability of Choice Functions on General Domains without Full Transitivity

The rationalizability of a choice function by means of a transitive relation has been analyzed thoroughly in the literature. However, not much seems to be known when transitivity is weakened to quasi-transitivity or acyclicity. We describe the logical relationships between the different notions of rationalizability involving, for example, the transitivity, quasi-transitivity, or acyclicity of the rationalizing relation. Furthermore, we discuss sufficient conditions and necessary conditions for rational choice on arbitrary domains. Transitive, quasi-transitive, and acyclical rationalizability are fully characterized for domains that contain all singletons and all two-element subsets of the universal set.

Efficiency in Uncertain Cooperative Games

A contingent contract in a transferable utility game under uncertainty specifies an outcome for each possible state. It is assumed that coalitions evaluate these contracts by considering the minimal possible excesses. A main question of the paper concerns the existence and characterization of efficient contracts. It is shown that they exist if and only if the set of possible coalitions contains a balanced subset. Moreover, a characterization of values that result in efficient contracts in the case of minimally balanced collections is provided.

Probabilistic Assignments of Identical Indivisible Objects and Uniform Probabilistic Rules.

We consider a probabilistic approach to the problem of assigning k indivisible identical objects to a set of agents with single-peaked preferences. Using the ordinal extension of preferences, we characterize the class of uniform probabilistic rules by Pareto efficiency, strategy-proofness, and no-envy. We also show that in this characterization no-envy cannot be replaced by anonymity. When agents are strictly risk averse von-Neumann-Morgenstern utility maximizers, then we reduce the problem of assigning k identical objects to a problem of allocating the amount k of an infinitely divisible commodity.

Consistent Rationalizability

Consistency of a binary relation requires any preference cycle to involve indifference only. As shown by Suzumura (1976b), consistency is necessary and sufficient for the existence of an ordering extension of a relation. Because of this important role of consistency, it is of interest to examine the rationalizability of choice functions by means of consistent relations. We describe the logical relationships between the different notions of rationalizability obtained if reflexivity or completeness are added to consistency, both for greatest-element rationalizability and for maximal-element rationalizability. All but one notion of consistent rationalizability are characterized for general domains, and all of them are characterized for domains that contain all two-element subsets of the universal set.

Bayesian Analysis for a Theory of Random Consumer Demand: The Case of Indivisible Goods

McCausland (2004a) describes a new theory of random consumer demand. Theoretically consistent random demand can be represented by a \"regular\" \"L-utility\" function on the consumption set X. The present paper is about Bayesian inference for regular L-utility functions. We express prior and posterior uncertainty in terms of distributions over the indefinite-dimensional parameter set of a flexible functional form. We propose a class of proper priors on the parameter set. The priors are flexible, in the sense that they put positive probability in the neighborhood of any L-utility function that is regular on a large subset bar(X) of X; and regular, in the sense that they assign zero probability to the set of L-utility functions that are irregular on bar(X). We propose methods of Bayesian inference for an environment with indivisible goods, leaving the more difficult case of indefinitely divisible goods for another paper. We analyse individual choice data from a consumer experiment described in Harbaugh et al. (2001).

The Possibility of Ordering Infinite Utility Streams

This paper revisits Diamond’s classical impossibility result regarding the ordering of infinite utility streams. We show that if no representability condition is imposed, there do exist strongly Paretian and finitely anonymous orderings of intertemporal utility streams with attractive additional properties. We extend a possibility theorem due to Svensson to a characterization theorem and we provide characterizations of all strongly Paretian and finitely anonymous rankings satisfying the strict transfer principle. In addition, infinite horizon extensions of leximin and of utilitarianism are characterized by adding an equity preference axiom and finite translation-scale measurability, respectively, to strong Pareto and finite anonymity.

The Progressivity of Equalization Payments in Federations

We investigate the conditions under which an inequality averse and additively separable welfarist constitution maker would always choose to set up a progressive equalization payments scheme in a federation with local public goods. A progressive equalization payments scheme is defined as a list of per capita net (possibly negative) subsidies - one such net subsidy for every jurisdiction - that are decreasing with respect to jurisdictions per capita wealth. We examine these questions in a setting in which the case for progressivity is a priori the strongest, namely, all citizens have the same utility function for the private and the public goods, inhabitants of a given jurisdiction are all identical, and they are not able to move across jurisdictions. We show that the constitution maker favors a progressive equalization payments scheme for all distributions of wealth and all population sizes if and only if its objective function is additively separable between each jurisdiction’s per capita wealth and number of inhabitants. When interpreted as a mean of order r social welfare function, this condition is shown to be equivalent to additive separability of the individual’s indirect utility function with respect to wealth and the price of the public good. Some implications of this restriction to the case where the individual’s direct utility function is additively separable are also derived.

Relative Uncertainty and Additively Representable Set Rankings

This paper proposes a definition of relative uncertainty aversion for decision models under complete uncertainty. It is shown that, for a large class of decision rules characterized by a set of plausible axioms, the new criterion yields a complete ranking of those rules with respect to the relative degree of uncertainty aversion they represent. In addition, we address a combinatorial question that arises in this context, and we examine conditions for the additive representability of our rules.

Rational Choice on Arbitrary Domains: A Comprehensive Treatment

The rationalizability of a choice function on arbitrary domains by means of a transitive relation has been analyzed thoroughly in the literature. Moreover, characterizations of various versions of consistent rationalizability have appeared in recent contributions. However, not much seems to be known when the coherence property of quasi-transitivity or that of P-acyclicity is imposed on a rationalization. The purpose of this paper is to fill this significant gap. We provide characterizations of all forms of rationalizability involving quasi-transitive or P-acyclical rationalizations on arbitrary domains.