This paper presents four theorems that connect continuity postulates in mathematical economics to solvability axioms in mathematical psychology, and ranks them under alternative supplementary assumptions. Theorem 1 connects notions of continuity (full, separate, Wold, weak Wold, Archimedean, mixture) with those of solvability (restricted, unrestricted) under the completeness and transitivity of a binary relation. Theorem 2 uses the primitive notion of a separately continuous function to answer the question when an analogous property on a relation is fully continuous. Theorem 3 provides (...) a portmanteau theorem on the equivalence between restricted solvability and various notions of continuity under weak monotonicity. Finally, Theorem 4 presents a variant of Theorem 3 that follows Theorem 1 in dispensing with the dimensionality requirement and in providing partial equivalences between solvability and continuity notions. These theorems are motivated for their potential use in representation theorems. (shrink)

On taking the common distinction between the legal and the ethical as a point of departure, and in an effort to understand Marshall's approach to self-interest, and thereby to his conception of an ethics of commerce, I read three of his essays in the light of some non-technical writings of Frank Hahn and three other Cambridge intellectuals. My larger project connects self-interest and self-deception to a possible ethics of theorizing in economics, and thereby to the ethics of the relationship between (...) the theorist and the theorized, the analyst and the analyzed. (shrink)

This paper considers decision problems involving partial information, and presents a conception of commodification of information under which a buyer with limited probabilistic sophistication can reduce any resulting ambiguity through purchases of new probabilistic information. In the specific formulation articulated herein, a lottery of information batches helps overcome the induced holdup during the contracting process. Under the proposed formulation, additional noise in the lottery leads to a reduction in the randomness of the buyer’s ambiguity by the introduction of an expectation (...) operator for random sets of beliefs. We show that the buyer’s utility function for information, formalized as Hurwicz expected utility, is monotone, continuous and linear in information. We then discuss the value of information within the corresponding decision problem and contrast it with the influential formulation of Radner–Stiglitz. (shrink)

Amar Bhidé’s Uncertainty and Enterprise: Ventures Beyond the Known, contributes handsomely to many registers: it contributes in the main to risk and uncertainty, to industrial organization, to probability theory but obliquely, to history of postwar economic thought more directly, to narratology in considerable measure, to pedagogy most certainly, especially as it revolves around the so-called “case-based method,” to epistemology by implication, to name only a select few. Furthermore, by virtue of style and format, the book can also be seen, and (...) used, as a general text to orient the lay reader (not to speak of business school students as well as budding economists seeking mainstream credentials) into the disciplinary room Bhidé sees and calls as his own. (shrink)