Showing 1 - 10 of 277
intertemporal decisions. The theory has applications in areas as diverse as labour supply, savings and investment, or education and …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005136755
This Paper studies the internal commitment mechanisms or ‘personal rules’ (diets, exercise regimens, resolutions, moral or religious precepts, etc.) through which people seek to achieve self-control. Our theory is based on the idea of self-reputation over one’s willpower, which potentially...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005136762
In this paper we develop a theory of time-inconsistency and regret that is motivated by evidence on a 'price discrimination' technique widespread in the United States, namely mail-in-rebate promotions. Our model combines partial naivete about future self-control problems and the sunk-cost effect...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005114356
Implementing incentive systems can sometimes backfire in practice: experimental evidence and folklore both suggest that offers of explicit rewards can expose surprising discontinuities in behaviour. This Paper models two such discontinuities that have been claimed by psychologists and...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005114276
This paper studies the interactions between an individual's self-esteem and his social environment - in the workplace, at school, and in personal relationships. Because a person generally has only imperfect knowledge of his own abilities, people who derive benefits from his performance (parent,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005656299
Limited consumer attention limits product market competition: prices are stochastically lower the more attention is paid. Ads compete to be the lowest price with other ads from the same sector and they compete for attention with ads from other sectors: equilibrium sector ad shares under free...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005000441
This paper investigates the effect of ethnolinguistic conflict on redistribution. The analysis focuses on the conflict arising between ‘peripheral’ minority groups and a dominant ‘centre’. We propose an index of linguistic conflict that (i) encompasses both diversity and polarization,...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005666970
the agent with an intermediary. We then show that our contract economy is equivalent to a consumption-savings economy with …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005498096
This Paper explores the implications of the recent sharp rise in US wage inequality for welfare and the cross-sectional distributions of hours worked, consumption and earnings. From 1967 to 1996 cross-sectional dispersion of earnings increased more than wage dispersion, due to a rise in the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005656181
We study infrequent durables stock adjustment by consumers who also derive utility from non-durable consumption flows, in the presence of idiosyncratic income uncertainty. We first characterize how the extent of uncertainty bears theoretically on the cross-sectional distribution of the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005114208