Scholarly Misconduct

Naked Exclusion

I should write up the Whinston footnote.

Mean-Preserving Spread

I should write up the Southern Methodist University plagiarism.

"Defining the Mean-Preserving Spread: 3-pt versus 4-pt," Decision Making Under Risk and Uncertainty: New Models and Empirical Findings , edited by John Geweke. Amsterdam: Kluwer, 1992 (with Emmanuel Petrakis ). The standard way to define a mean-preserving spread is in terms of changes in the probability at four points of a distribution (Rothschild and Stiglitz [1970]). Our alternative definition is in terms of changes in the probability at just three points. Any 4-pt mean- preserving spread can be constructed from two 3-pt mean-preserving spreads, and any 3-pt mean-preserving spread can be constructed from two 4-pt mean- preserving spreads. The 3-pt definition is simpler and more often applicable. It also permits easy rectification of a mistake in the Rothschild-Stiglitz proof that adding a mean- preserving spread is equivalent to other measures of increasing risk. pdf (http://rasmusen.org/published/Rasmusen_92BOOK.mps.pdf

It is rumored that Rothschild and Stiglitz both took a course on Hardy-Littlewood-Polya.

Someone said: "Advanced results with elementary mean-preserving spreads are in Chew, Soo Hong & Mei-Hui Mao (1995) “A Schur-Concave Characterization of Risk Aversion for Non-Expected Utility Preferences,” Journal of Economic Theory 67, 402–435. Chew’s proofs are always sloppy, but his results are usually right modulo some small details of continuity."

I need to write up the long history of this paper, including the posters at UCLA nad the prize of co-authorship, and the Macao email about the Israelis in JET, and the Rothschild email.