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This article, titled "A Comment on: 'Presidential Address: Economics and Measurement: New Measures to Model Decision Making' by Ingvild Almås, Orazio Attanasio, and Pamela Jervis," discusses the use of economic theory to develop new measurement tools and how the resulting data can be used to further develop economic theory. The author agrees with the address and focuses on the study of how economic agents perceive the economic environment. The article provides a concrete example of learning about a household's coefficient of relative risk aversion and discusses different approaches to measuring this parameter. It concludes by highlighting the importance of understanding how economic agents perceive their environment in order to make the best use of measurement tools. [Extracted from the article]

This article contains new tools for studying the shape of the stationary distribution of sizes in a dynamic economic system in which units experience random multiplicative shocks and are occasionally reset. Each unit has a Markov‐switching type, which influences their growth rate and reset probability. We show that the size distribution has a Pareto upper tail, with exponent equal to the unique positive solution to an equation involving the spectral radius of a certain matrix‐valued function. Under a nonlattice condition on growth rates, an eigenvector associated with the Pareto exponent provides the distribution of types in the upper tail of the size distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an economy with one public and one private good, egalitarian-equivalent cost sharing consists of finding the highest public good level x* such that consuming x* for free yields a feasible utility distribution. The corresponding feasible allocation (typically unique), called egalitarian-equivalent, is in the core of the economy. Conversely, any cost sharing method satisfying: (i) Pareto optimality, (ii) cost monotonicity (nobody suffers a utility loss if the production technology improves upon, ceteris paribus), and (iii) individual rationality (no single agent coalition objects) or (iii') no private transfers (no agent receives a positive amount of private good), must select an egalitarian-equivalent allocation in every economy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The existence of equilibrium and Pareto optimal allocations in economies with an infinite number of commodities is studied. It is shown that any topology stronger than the Mackey topology might lead to the nonexistence of nontrivial Pareto optimal allocations. I.e., there exists a well behaved economy with preferences that are continuous in this topology and without individually rational Pareto optimal allocations. A converse of this theorem, a slight modification of Bewley's existence of equilibrium theorem, is also proved. Using a characterization of the Mackey topology in terms of impatience of consumers, due to Brown and Lewis, an interpretation of the theorem above is given: a topology is such that continuity with respect to it implies existence of nontrivial Pareto optimal allocations if and only if it also implies impatience on the part of the consumers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses a theorem that provides a set of sufficient conditions on a game which guarantees the nonemptiness of its core, even if preferences are not required to be transitive or complete. The major requirement is a kind of balanced condition. A discussion of the difference between the notion of balancedness in the theorem and H. Scarf's balanced condition follows. The theorem is then used to prove a new result on the nonemptiness of the core of a coalitional production economy without ordered preferences.

The core of a game, which is an abstraction of the core or set of cooperative equilibrium states of an economy, is a fundamental notion of social equilibrium. However, except for games derived from special kinds of economic situations or satisfying restrictive (balancedness) conditions, the core is usually empty. In contrast, this paper shows that, with mild and economically natural assumptions, large games always have non-empty approximate cores. The game-theoretic framework is sufficiently general to cover a wide variety of economic situations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider a closed economy with several deposits of an exhaustible resource, with the marginal cost of extraction differing from deposit to deposit but constant for each deposit. It is widely believed that social optimality requires that deposits be exploited in strict sequence, beginning with the lowest cost deposit. It is shown that, in a general equilibrium context, with Ricardian techniques of extraction, the validity of the proposition depends on what is meant by constancy of cost. It is also believed that if there exists a high-cost substitute for the resource then the resource should be exhausted before production of the substitute is begun. It is shown that this proposition is false. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing up a medium term economic plan usually involves a complicated interaction between the planning ministry and representatives of the various industries, firms, or departments. Each economic agent works in his own environment with at best incomplete information about the other agents. Yet somehow the economic system as a whole is typically able to move toward an operational plan which is satisfactory even when judged by the criterion of complete information. This paper examines the properties of one particular theoretical mode! of economic planning in which the center transmits information via a system of quotas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is concerned with the use of spectral analysis to analyze data generated by computer simulation experiments with models of economic systems. An example model serves to illustrate two different applications of spectral analysis. First, spectral analysis is used to construct confidence bands and to test hypotheses for the purpose of comparing the results of the use of two or more alternative economic policies. Second, spectral analysis is employed as a technique for validating an econometric model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]