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Sweezy's kinky demand curve and prediction of price rigidity under oligopoly has recently been supplemented by a similar prediction (on different grounds) by Drèze. This paper questions assumptions made by both authors and shows that alternative assumptions reverse the prediction.

AbstractThis is an appreciation of the life and work of Michael Jones-Lee. It describes his pioneering role in establishing and developing the theory and practice of the elicitation of monetary values for changes in risks to life, health and safety, using stated preference methods.

AbstractIntertemporal preference reversals occur when individuals choose future option A over future option B in a direct choice between the two but place a higher 'immediate cash' value on B than on A. Tversky et al. (1990) reported strong evidence of such reversals, which they attributed mainly to valuation biases rather than intransitivity. We find similar levels of reversals, even after adjusting for considerable degrees of variability and imprecision in people's responses. However, we disagree with Tversky et al.'s conclusions about the causes of the majority of these reversals. We find substantial levels of intransitivity in respondents' binary choices as well as differential overvaluation of both options relative to the values inferred from their choices.

The Harless–Camerer (HC), Hey–Orme (HO) and random preference (RP) models of stochastic variation in choice under uncertainty are compared. Implications of these models, including some that are independent of the deterministic theory with which they are combined, are tested in an experiment in which participants respond to decision problems twice. The HC model generally performs poorly; the HO model predicts more violations of dominance than are observed; while the RP model fails to account for those few violations which do occur. Additional regularities are observed which are inconsistent with all three models when combined with expected utility theory.

This paper presents an aspiration‐satisficing model of consumer search under limited information where no optimal strategy is defined. The model is contrasted with the Hey (Journal of Economic Behaviour and Organization (1982), Vol. 3, No. 1, pp. 65–81; (1987), Vol. 8, No. 2, pp. 137–144) ``bounce rules''. Experimental evidence is presented which, in this environment, lends support for the former explanation over the latter. In particular, the order in which price quotes were received was not accorded significance. These contrasting results suggest that subjects may utilize rules of varying degrees of sophistication depending on the costs and expected benefits attached to their use in different informational environments. A simpler version of the aspiration‐satisficing model is then developed that produces an ``order effect''.