This paper shows how a firm can use non-targeted advertising to exploit consumers' desire for social status. A monopolist sells multiple varieties of a good to consumers who each care about what others believe about his wealth. Advertising allows consumers both to buy different varieties and to...

This paper provides experimental evidence showing that indirectreciprocity may important in economic decision making and in thedevelopment of group norms. We study a `repeated helping game' withrandom pairing in large groups, with individuals equally dividedbetween donors and recipients. Donors...

This paper develops a conception of personal identity for Amartya Sen's capability framework that emphasizes his self-scrutinizing aspect of the self and related concept of commitment, and compares this conception to the co1lective intentionality-based one advanced in Davis (2003c). The paper...

This paper develops a model in which individuals gain social status among their peers for being 'tough' by committing violent acts. We show that a high penalty for moderately violent acts (zero-tolerance) may yield a double dividend in that it reduces both moderate and extreme violence. The...

Understanding of the substantial disparity in health between low and high socioeconomic status (SES) groups is hampered by the lack of a suffciently comprehensive theoretical framework to interpret empirical facts and to predict yet untested relations. We present a life-cycle model that...

The Brabant Data Set, now freely accessible, contains informationon a sample cohort of 3,000 individuals born around 1940 from surveysin 1952, 1983 and 1993, as well as on deaths between 1994 and 2009.In line with numerous epidemiological studies we find that among theearly variables recorded at...

This technical note consists of three parts. The first describes theorigins of the Brabant data set, the later surveys and the mortalitydata. The second section discusses the variation of mortality rateswith age in the population and in the sample. The third section setsout the proportional...