Economists have traditionally treated preferences as exogenously given. Preferences are assumed to be influenced by neither beliefs nor the constraints people face. As a consequence, changes in behaviour are explained exclusively in terms of changes in the set of feasible alternatives. Here we...

The fundamental question addressed in this research is the degree to which models of optimal intertemporal choice are good descriptions of non-interactive individual intertemporal behavior in the presence of habit formation. The existence of loss avoidance does, however, not explain why subjects...