Theory and Decision

ISSNs: 0040-5833, 1573-7187

19 found

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  1.  1
    Hard vs. soft commitments: experimental evidence from a sample of French gamblers.Paul Bettega, Paolo Crosetto, Dimitri Dubois & Rustam Romaniuc - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (3):447-472.
    People use commitment devices to formalize and facilitate their goals. Self-commitments are ubiquitous and may take different forms: soft, when the commitment can be broken at a low cost, or hard, when that cost is high. The effects of soft and hard commitments have usually been studied separately. We conduct an online experiment with 1527 individuals representative of a big gambling company’s client population to study the comparative effects of hard and soft commitment devices in a risk taking game. Our (...)
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  2.  2
    Attitudes towards natural sources of uncertainty for gains and losses.Mohamed El Guide, Yassine Kaouane, Sonia Mun & Hayat Zouiten - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (3):405-445.
    Little is known about how ambiguity attitudes change when consequences are flipped from gains to losses, particularly in the context of natural sources. Focusing on two such sources of uncertainty - the voter participation rates in the 2019 European elections in France and the UK - we report econometric estimations that jointly capture parametric specifications of attitudes and beliefs in the gain and loss domains. For checking purposes, we also compute indexes of ambiguity attitudes proposed by Baillon et al. (2018). (...)
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  3. New axiomatizations of the Owen value.Songtao He, Bingxin Yu & Erfang Shan - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (3):351-365.
    Differential marginality states that two players’ payoffs change by the same amount with respect to two games if their productivity (measured by the marginal contributions) changes by the same amount, that is, they are symmetric in the difference of these games. This principle can be applied to characterize the Owen value for games with coalition structure. In this paper we suggest two relaxations of differential marginality within unions by requiring that two players are either mutually dependent or necessary rather than (...)
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  4. Bidding behaviour in experimental auctions under risk and uncertainty.Chloe S. McCallum, Simone Cerroni, Daniel Derbyshire, W. George Hutchinson & Rodolfo M. Nayga - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (3):323-349.
    This paper explores bidding behaviour under risk and uncertainty using the Becker-DeGroot-Marschak mechanism (BDM) and second price auction (SPA). It investigates whether values elicited via the two mechanisms are consistent and whether bidding behaviour can be influenced by differences in the number and type of sources of risk and uncertainty that people face when exposed to the two mechanisms. In our experiment, subjects are exposed to non-monetary lotteries where they bid for a high-quality seafood product, but there is a chance (...)
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  5.  1
    Ambiguity attitudes of individuals and groups in gain and loss domains.Aljoscha Minnich & Andreas Lange - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (3):373-403.
    This study measures the differences in ambiguity attitudes of groups and individuals in the gain and loss domains. We elicit ambiguity aversion and ambiguity-generated insensitivity for natural temperature events. We do not find significant differences between individuals and groups in our main sample, yet higher ambiguity aversion and ambiguity-generated insensitivity result for groups in the gain domain when constraining the sample to groups and individuals with a better understanding of the experiment. The group effect on the ambiguity-generated insensitivity is sign-dependent.
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  6. On the existence of stable matchings with contracts.Yi-You Yang - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (3):367-372.
    We generalize the notion of firm-quasi-stability to the framework of many-to-many matching with contracts under the irrelevance of rejected contracts and substitutability assumptions. We prove that a maximal element of the set of firm-quasi-stable allocations with respect to a partial order exists and is a stable allocation.
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  7. Escaping Arrow’s theorem: the Advantage-Standard model.Wesley Holliday & Mikayla Kelley - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (2):165-204.
    There is an extensive literature in social choice theory studying the consequences of weakening the assumptions of Arrow’s Impossibility Theorem. Much of this literature suggests that there is no escape from Arrow-style impossibility theorems, while remaining in an ordinal preference setting, unless one drastically violates the Independence of Irrelevant Alternatives (IIA). In this paper, we present a more positive outlook. We propose a model of comparing candidates in elections, which we call the Advantage-Standard (AS) model. The requirement that a collective (...)
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  8.  2
    Fear of exclusion: the dynamics of club formation.Priyanka Joshi - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (2):249-276.
    This paper explores a dynamic model of sequential club formation in which identical individuals join or leave clubs over time and their preferences depend solely on the number of members in the club. There exists a unique optimal-sized club which maximises per-period payoff of each individual. To study the implications of the dynamic setting, we use a benchmark game of a finite number of periods which mimics the static framework. Implied by the dynamic nature of the problem, we find a (...)
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  9.  8
    How much you talk matters: cheap talk and collusion in a Bertrand oligopoly game.Jun Yeong Lee & Elizabeth Hoffman - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (2):277-297.
    This study investigates the impact of cheap talk on price and participant profits using a repeated Bertrand oligopoly experiment. During the first 10 rounds, participants are not allowed to communicate with each other. Twenty additional rounds are then played in which the participants can text with one another using an instant message system. Some groups are allowed to text before every round, some before every other round, some every third round, some every fourth round, and others only every fifth round. (...)
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  10.  3
    Correction: Taste-independence: an escape route from the opportunity paradox.Jun Matsui - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (2):321-321.
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  11.  2
    Taste-independence: an escape route from the opportunity paradox.Jun Matsui - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (2):299-320.
    We provide an escape route from the opportunity paradox, which is described as a conflict between the ex ante and ex post perspectives on compensation by restricting the preference domain. Taste-independence is introduced as a property of preferences such that individuals’ maximized utility levels are the same regardless of their tastes for work. Using the optimal income taxation model, we obtain a compatibility theorem when individuals’ utilities are taste-independent and quasilinear in consumption.
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  12. Sabotage-proof social ranking solutions.Takahiro Suzuki & Masahide Horita - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (2):205-224.
    Robustness against strategic manipulation is a crucial topic in social choice theory. Under some social ranking solutions (SRSs), namely mappings that yield candidates’ ranking from their coalitions’ ranking, candidates can sometimes improve their own social ranking by strategically degrading the coalitions to which they belong (e.g., sabotaging the coalitions to which the candidates and their competitors both belong could damage their competitors’ social rankings). This study investigates SRSs that can prevent such sabotage and promote sincere cooperation between candidates. To this (...)
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  13.  4
    Buyout decisions of level-k bidders in second-price auctions.Toshihiro Tsuchihashi & Tomohisa Okada - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (2):225-248.
    Buyout options are available to bidders in certain online auctions. This study analyzes a bidder’s buyout decision following the level-k auction theory proposed by Crawford and Iriberri (2007). Specifically, we derive the optimal buyout strategy of type Lk. We have three significant findings. First, the buyout decisions of Lk and $$Lk-1$$ are strategic substitutes. If $$Lk-1$$ ’s buyout incentive is stronger (weaker, respectively) than a rational bidder’s, then Lk’s buyout incentive is weaker (stronger, respectively) than a rational bidder’s. Second, if (...)
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  14.  1
    Early contributors and fair rewards in crowdfunding.Sylvain Béal, Marc Deschamps, Catherine Refait-Alexandre & Guillaume Sekli - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (1):33-59.
    We address the issue of fairly rewarding contributors to a crowdfunded project. We develop a theoretical non-strategic model, and introduce a new reward rule: a contributor’s reward depends both on her financial contribution and on the timing of her contribution. Following the axiomatic method used in models of resource sharing, we characterize this new reward rule by a pair of natural axioms. The resulting rewards coincide with the Shapley value of a suitable cooperative game built from the crowdfunding project. This (...)
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  15.  1
    The role of polarization and hostility on equilibria in a simple class of symmetric conflict models.Fausto Cavalli, Mario Gilli & Ahmad Naimzada - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (1):61-83.
    This study aims to provide a manageable symmetric two-players conflict model in which, defining measures for polarization and hostility, we investigate the effects of spillovers into the properties of the sets of equilibria, into the intensity of conflict, and into the endogenous changes in polarization and hostility. We show that, without spillovers, the equilibrium efforts’ intensity is uniquely connected to the ratio of the marginal productivity of effort to (ex ante) polarization. Conversely, we show that negative spillovers in conflict technology (...)
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  16.  1
    Revealing preference discovery: a chronological choice framework.João V. Ferreira & Nicolas Gravel - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (1):1-32.
    We propose a framework for the analysis of choice behaviour when the latter is made explicitly in chronological order. We relate this framework to the traditional choice theoretic setting from which the chronological aspect is absent, and compare it to other frameworks that extend this traditional setting. Then, we use this framework to analyse various models of preference discovery. We characterise, via simple revealed preference tests, several models that differ in terms of (1) the priors that the decision-maker holds about (...)
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  17.  4
    Some Notes on Savage’s Representation Theorem.Gabriel Frahm & Lorenz Hartmann - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (1):85-93.
    Savage’s famous representation theorem is based on seven postulates of rational choice. We resolve some loose ends in the literature concerning the relationship between different versions of Savage’s axioms. This leads us to the present form of the representation theorem. We also discuss some issues regarding the historical development of Savage’s representation theorem.
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  18.  4
    Incorporating conditional morality into economic decisions.David Masclet & David L. Dickinson - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (1):95-152.
    We present a theoretical framework of individual-decision making that incorporates both moral motivations and social influence into the utility function. The main idea of the paper is that individuals face a trade-off between their material individual interests and their desire to follow moral obligation. In our model, we assume that moral motivation is weak or conditional in the sense that it may be influenced by others’ actions. Specifically, in our framework one’s moral obligation is a combination of two main components: (...)
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  19. Small Amendment Arguments: How They Work and What They Do and Do Not Show.Martin van Hees, Akshath Jitendranath & Roland Iwan Luttens - 2025 - Theory and Decision 98 (1):153-163.
    The small improvement argument has been said to establish that the standard weak preference or value relation can be incomplete. We first show that the argument is one of three possible ‘small amendment arguments’, each of which would yield the same conclusion. Generalizing the analysis thus, we subsequently present a strong and a weak version of small amendment arguments and derive the exact rationality conditions under which they reveal incompleteness. The results show that the arguments (in any of their variants) (...)
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