This paper contributes to the axiomatization of additive rules for ranking sets of objects under the psychological principle of categorization. Firstly we proceed with the case where the elements in the sets are categorized into at most three groups, namely good (with value 1), neutral (with...

Almost all important decisions in people’s lives entail risky and delayed consequences. Regardless of whether we make choices involving health, wealth, love or education, almost every choice involves costs and benefits that are uncertain and materialize over time. Because risk and delay often...

We provide an axiomatic approach to a belief formation process in an informational environment characterized by limited, heterogenous and differently precise information. For a list of previously observed cases an agent needs to express her belief by assigning probabilities to possible outcomes....

An agent wants to derive her belief over outcomes based on past observations collected in her database (memory). There is well establish evidence in the psychology and marketing literature that agents consistently fail (or choose not) to process all available information. An agent might be...

A theory of incomplete preferences under uncertainty is proposed, according to which a decision maker's preferences are indeterminate if and only if her confidence in the relevant beliefs does not match up to the stakes involved in the decision. We use the model of confidence in beliefs...

In this paper we assess the importance of sample type in the estimation of risk preferences. We elicit and compare risk preferences from student subjects and subjects drawn from the general population, using the multiple price list method devised by Holt and Laury in their paper Risk Aversion...

Influential economic approaches as random utility models or quantal-response equilibria assume a monotonic relation between error rates and choice difficulty or "strength of preference", in line with widespread evidence from discrimination tasks in psychology and neuroscience. However, while the...

This paper makes explicit the role of the entrepreneur in a consumer-producer economy. Entrepreneurial behavior changes the status quo by altering existing comparative advantages. A positive feedback effect with trading institutions ensues. This model shows how the entrepreneur can, when...

We observe that identification of the discount rate from experimental data requires an assumption about the consumption period, the length of time over which a payment will be turned into utility-providing consumption. We show that the optimal consumption period is substantially longer than...

We test the implications of ambiguity aversion in a principal–agent problem with multiple agents. Models of ambiguity aversion suggest that, under ambiguity, comparative compensation schemes may become more attractive than independent wage contracts. We test this by presenting agents with a...