A Reflection on Economic Uncertainty and Fertility in Europe: The Narrative Framework

none5openVignoli, Daniele; Guetto, Raffaele; Bazzani, Giacomo; Pirani, Elena; Minello, AlessandraVignoli, Daniele; Guetto, Raffaele; Bazzani, Giacomo; Pirani, Elena; Minello, Alessandr

Making the Anscombe-Aumann approach to ambiguity suitable for descriptive applications

The Anscombe-Aumann (AA) model, originally introduced to give a normative basis to expected utility, is nowadays mostly used for another purpose: to analyze deviations from expected utility due to ambiguity (unknown probabilities). The AA model makes two ancillary assumptions that do not refer to ambiguity: expected utility for risk and backward induction. These assumptions, even if normatively appropriate, fail descriptively. This paper relaxes these ancillary assumptions to avoid the descriptive violations, while maintaining AA\xe2\x80\x99s convenient mixture operation. Thus, it becomes possible to test and apply all AA-based ambiguity theories descriptively while avoiding confounds due to violated ancillary assumptions. The resulting tests use only simple stimuli, avoiding noise due to complexity. We demonstrate the latter in a simple experiment where we find that three assumptions about ambiguity, commonly made in AA theories, are violated: reference independence, universal ambiguity aversion, and weak certainty independence. The second, theoretical, part of the paper accommodates the violations found for the first ambiguity theory in the AA model\xe2\x80\x94Schmeidler\xe2\x80\x99s CEU theory\xe2\x80\x94by introducing and axiomatizing a reference dependent generalization. That is, we extend the AA ambiguity model to prospect theory

ANTIDEPRESSIVI E STABILIZZANTI DELL'UMORE

What conception of economic theory did Piero Sraffa have when, at the initiative of Keynes, he arrived at Cambridge in the second half of the 1920s and – with his surprisingly original initial contributions (1925 and 1926) – immediately upset the established views on political economy, dominated at that time by the leadership of Alfred Marshall’s writings? Even more importantly for us at present, what were his conceptions of the relevant direction of the evolution of economics, when 40 years later he decided to publish his famously concise, but disconcerting, book Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities (1960)? Can we infer, from his masterpiece and from his other writings, his final convictions on the relevant direction for the future of economic theory? The present paper aims at considering these questions