School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Multiple equilibria in a cash-in-advance two-sector economy

Abstract: We consider a two-sector infinite horizon economy with a fractional cash-in-advance constraint on consumption expenditures. This formulation allows us to consider a steady-state velocity of money that is strictly greater than one and, therefore, provides a more plausible framework than the standard formulation in which all the consumption purchases are paid cash. We prove that the steady state is bound to be indeterminate and multiple equilibria occur when the share of the liquidity constraint is low enough and that a capital-intensive investment good or a strongly capital-intensive consumption good improve considerably the scope for indeterminacy. As a consequence, we show that without any restriction on the elasticity of intertemporal substitution in consumption, multiple equilibria might occur if the velocity of money is greater than a critical bound that is compatible with empirical estimates.

Le « moral » en cancérologie Stratégies et discours des soignants dans l’accompagnement des malades

Abstract: A travers l’utilisation qui est faite du substantif « moral » en cancerologie et des representations qu’il recouvre, se revelent les strategies mises en œuvre par les soignants dans leur relation aux patients, mais aussi l’impact de leurs conceptions personnelles sur le rapport entre le psychique et le physique, ainsi que leurs criteres d’appreciation du bien-etre des malades. Le « bon moral » des patients, qu’il soit concu comme un relatif bien-etre, l’adaptation a la maladie ou le cheminement vers un nouvel etat, est synonyme de confort tant pour les malades que pour les equipes soignantes. Or, l’annonce de la mauvaise nouvelle: la recidive ou l’imminence de la mort, met en echec les strategies soignantes du maintien de l’espoir et de la projection vers un mieux-etre. Cette analyse du « moral », comme vecteur des representations soignantes, met ainsi en lumiere les difficultes qui subsistent pour les equipes a faire face a la maladie et a la mort.

By Force of Habit: Self-Trapping in a Dynamical Utility Landscape

Abstract: Historically, rational choice theory has focused on the utility maximization principle to describe how individuals make choices. In reality, there is a computational cost related to exploring the universe of available choices and it is often not clear whether we are truly maximizing an underlying utility function. In particular, memory effects and habit formation may dominate over utility maximisation. We propose a stylized model with a history-dependent utility function where the utility associated to each choice is increased when that choice has been made in the past, with a certain decaying memory kernel. We show that self-reinforcing effects can cause the agent to get stuck with a choice by sheer force of habit. We discuss the special nature of the transition between free exploration of the space of choice and self-trapping. We find in particular that the trapping time distribution is precisely a Zipf law at the transition, and that the self-trapped phase exhibits super-aging behaviour.

Welfare Comparisons Among Individuals Under Samuelson’s Model of Households

Abstract: The paper investigates the relation between welfare among households and welfare among individuals. Following Samuelson’s model of the family, it is assumed that family’s members share the household income by maximizing a weighted sum of individual utility functions. While the individual population is considered as homogeneous from the point of view of social planner, individuals are treated unequally within each household. We assume a strong regularity in this unfair treatment by assigning a given weight to each type of individuals. The main result shows that the welfare ranking among households is preserved at the individual level if the utility function is increasing, concave and satisfies additional assumptions expressed in terms of the absolute inequality aversion and the absolute prudence towards inequality.