Publications

Marxists have viewed the task of socialism as the elimination of exploitation, defined in the Marxian manner in terms the excess of labor expended over of labor commanded. I argue that the concept of Marxian exploitation commits both type-one (false positives) and type-two (false negatives) errors as a diagnosis of distributive injustice: it misses instances of distributive injustice because they do not involve exploitation, and it calls some economic relations characterized by exploitation unjust when they are not. The most important reformulators of Marx’s concept of socialism, which implicitly or explicitly attempt to correct the Marxian errors, are Oscar Lange, James Meade, John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Ronald Dworkin and G.A. Cohen. I trace this development, and argue for a re-definition of socialist principles based upon it.

We provide an axiomatic analysis of dynamic random utility, characterizing the stochastic choice behavior of agents who solve dynamic decision problems by maximizing some stochastic process (U_t) of utilities. We show first that even when (U_t) is arbitrary, dynamic random utility imposes new testable restrictions on how behavior across periods is related, over and above period-by-period analogs of the static random utility axioms: An important feature of dynamic random utility is that behavior may appear history dependent, because past choices reveal information about agents’ past utilities and (U_t) may be serially correlated; however, our key new axioms highlight that the model entails specific limits on the form of history dependence that can arise. Second, we show that when agents’ choices today influence their menu tomorrow (e.g., in consumption-savings or stopping problems), imposing natural Bayesian rationality axioms restricts the form of randomness that (U_t) can display. By contrast, a specification of utility shocks that is widely used in empirical work violates these restrictions, leading to behavior that may display a negative option value and can produce biased parameter estimates. Finally, dynamic stochastic choice data allows us to characterize important special cases of random utility—in particular, learning and taste persistence—that on static domains are indistinguishable from the general model.