The problems associated with interpersonal comparisons are particularly intractable. This paper presents a procedure whereby the relative importance of any particular individual varies over the set of social states. In one sense, the stronger (relative to some norm) a person feels about any particular pairwise decision, the larger his say in that outcome. This procedure leads to a nested sequence of aggregate partial orderings which reflects this strength of preference. Under the assumptions presented it is also possible, given any two social states, to characterize the minimal amount of interpersonal comparison which is necessary in order to arrive at an aggregate ordering.

The financial experiences of the last two years impel a careful and wide-ranging review of the stability of our major types of financial institutions. That review ought to be followed by actions to redress weaknesses or proclivities that, upon analysis, are judged to contribute an undesirable degree of instability within the financial system.

Richard C. Aspinwall, Discussion: Implications of Recent Banking Developments for Financial Stability, The Journal of Financial and Quantitative Analysis, Vol. 10, No. 4, 1975 Proceedings (Nov., 1975), pp. 611-613

Journal Article An Asymptotic Theory of Growth Under Uncertainty Get access Robert C. Merton Robert C. Merton Massachusetts Institute of Technology Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Review of Economic Studies, Volume 42, Issue 3, July 1975, Pages 375–393, https://doi.org/10.2307/2296851 Published: 01 July 1975

[A one-way expected utility representation has the expected utility of one probability measure greater than the expected utility of another probability measure whenever the first is preferred to the second. It requires preferences to be acyclic but not necessarily transitive, and does not require indifference to be transitive. Preference axioms which are sufficient for one-way expected utility for sets of simple probability measures have been presented before (see [8]). This paper uses additional axioms to extend the one-way representation to sets of discrete and more general probability measures.]

This paper presents a methodology for determining the true costs of alternative sources of financing for the multinational corporation when the risk of exchange rate changes is present and different tax rates and regulations are in effect. The cost formulas presented can then be used to calculate the cheapest financing source given the expected exchange rate changes.

Canonical correlation analysis of manufacturing firm data demonstrated that organizational ?competence? (executive ratings of organizational performance and executive turnover) was not strongly related to situational variables like organization size, structure, and technology. Instead, ?competence? was related primarily to management's values regarding the firm's publics, such as customers, suppliers, employees, and government.

I. Introduction, 195. — II. Formulation of an appropriate function of international capital flow, 197. — III. Reappraisal of Mundell's assignment problem, 200. — IV. Further look into the basic stability of the system, 207.

Abstract This article presents comments of the author on the paper "Theory Versus Practice in Risk Analysis: An Empirical Study," by W.R. Greer that was published in the July 1974 of the periodical "The Accounting Review." In his paper, Greer concluded that there appears to be a substantial conflict between the decision processes used by actual decision makers and existing utility theory. The conflict seems to center around the inability of classical utility theory to deal effectively with situations where one or more of the contingent outcomes for a project are lower than some critical amount. The form of utility function employed by Greer was the utility of an investment opportunity is an increasing function of the expected value of that opportunity and a decreasing function of the risk of the opportunity. Greer employed the standard deviation of payoffs as the measure of risk. This comment contends that the actual decisions of the firms in Greer's study are not inconsistent with a utility function of the form described if instead semi-variance is used as the measure of risk.