Putting all eggs in one basket: some insights from a correlation inequality

Pradeep Dubey, Siddhartha Sahi and Guanyang Wang

Papers from arXiv.org

Abstract: We give examples of situations -- stochastic production, military tactics, corporate merger -- where it is beneficial to concentrate risk rather than to diversify it, that is, to put all eggs in one basket. Our examples admit a dual interpretation: as optimal strategies of a single player (the `principal') or, alternatively, as dominant strategies in a non-cooperative game with multiple players (the `agents'). The key mathematical result can be formulated in terms of a convolution structure on the set of increasing functions on a Boolean lattice (the lattice of subsets of a finite set). This generalizes the well-known Harris inequality from statistical physics and discrete mathematics; we give a simple self-contained proof of this result, and prove a further generalization based on the game-theoretic approach.

Date: 2024-03, Revised 2024-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-gth and nep-rmg
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