Behavioral economics has demonstrated systematic decision-making biases in both lab and field data. But are these biases learned or innate? We investigate this question using experiments on a novel set of subjects — capuchin monkeys. By introducing a fiat currency and trade to a capuchin...

Most theories of risky choice postulate that a decision maker maximizes the expectation of a Bernoulli (or utility or similar) function. We tour 60 years of empirical search and conclude that no such functions have yet been found that are useful for out-of-sample prediction. Nor do we find...

The knowledge constraints and transactions costs imposed by geographical distance, network connections and time conspire to justify local behavior as a good approximation for global rationality. We consider a class of games to illustrate this relationship and raise some questions as to what...

The size and style of referencing for a large sample of 60 years of publications of the Cowles Foundation are examined. The influence of computerization is considered. Self-referencing is noted and some observations are made on the costs and distribution of research papers.

Examples of repeated destructive behavior abound throughout the history of human societies. This paper examines the role of social memory -- a society's vicarious beliefs about the past -- in creating and perpetuating destructive conflicts. We examine whether such behavior is consistent with the...

We propose a procedure for estimating the critical values of the Klecan, McFadden, and McFadden (1990) test for first and second order stochastic dominance in the general k-prospect case. Our method is based on subsampling bootstrap. We show that the resulting test is consistent. We allow for...

Savage (1954) provided a set of axioms on preferences over acts that were equivalent to the existence of an expected utility representation. We show that in addition to this representation, there is a continuum of other "expected utility" representations in which for any act, the probability...

Motivated by the rise of social media, we build a model studying the effect of an economy’s potential for social learning on the adoption of innovations of uncertain quality. Provided consumers are forward-looking (i.e., recognize the value of waiting for information), equilibrium dynamics...

We axiomatize, in an Anscombe-Aumann framework, the class of preferences that admit a representation of the form V(f) = mu - rho(d), where mu is the mean utility of the act f with respect to a given probability, d is the vector of state-by-state utility deviations from the mean, and rho(d) is a...