Econometrica

Journal Of The Econometric Society

An International Society for the Advancement of Economic
Theory in its Relation to Statistics and Mathematics

Edited by: Guido W. Imbens • Print ISSN: 0012-9682 • Online ISSN: 1468-0262

Econometrica: Jul, 2024, Volume 92, Issue 4

Monotone Additive Statistics

https://doi.org/10.3982/ECTA19967
p. 995-1031

Xiaosheng Mu, Luciano Pomatto, Philipp Strack, Omer Tamuz

The expectation is an example of a descriptive statistic that is monotone with respect to stochastic dominance, and additive for sums of independent random variables. We provide a complete characterization of such statistics, and explore a number of applications to models of individual and group decision‐making. These include a representation of stationary monotone time preferences, extending the work of Fishburn and Rubinstein (1982) to time lotteries. This extension offers a new perspective on risk attitudes toward time, as well as on the aggregation of multiple discount factors. We also offer a novel class of non‐expected utility preferences over gambles which satisfy invariance to background risk as well as betweenness, but are versatile enough to capture mixed risk attitudes.


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Supplemental Material

Supplement to "Monotone Additive Statistics"

Xiaosheng Mu, Luciano Pomatto, Philipp Strack, and Omer Tamuz

The appendix contains the omitted proofs for most of the results in the main text, in the order in which they appeared. The only exceptions are Theorem 2 regarding the larger domain LM, Proposition 1 regarding strong stochastic dynamic consistency and a few results in Section 4, whose proofs are relegated to the online appendix.