Qualitative business survey data are used widely to provide indicators of economic activity ahead of the publication of official data. Traditional indicators exploit only aggregate survey information, namely the proportions of respondents who report “up” and “down”. This paper examines...

Consider a finite data set where each observation consists of a bundle of contingent consumption chosen from a constraint set of contingent consumption bundles. We develop a general procedure for testing the consistency of such a data set with a broad class of models of choice under risk or...

A critical element in all discounted utility models is the specification of a discount function. We extend the standard model to allow for reference points for both out- comes and time. We consider the axiomatic foundations and properties of two main classes of discount functions. The first, the...

We consider a discounted utility model that has two components. (1) The instan- taneous utility is of the prospect theory form, thus, allowing for reference dependent outcomes. (2) The discount function embodies a ‘reference time’ to which all future outcomes are discounted back to, hence,...

A critical element in all discounted utility models is the specification of a discount function. We introduce three functions: the delay, speedup and generating functions. Each can be uniquely elicited from behaviour. The delay function determines stationary and the common difference effect. The...

Evidence shows that (i) people overweight low probabilities and underweight high probabilities, but (ii) ignore events of extremely low probability and treat extremely high probability events as certain. The main alternative decision theories, rank dependent utility (RDU) and cumulative prospect...

We focus on four stylized facts of behavior under risk. Decision makers: (1) Overweight low probabilities and underweight high probabilities. (2) Ignore events of extremely low probability and treat extremely high probability events as certain. (3) Buy inadequate insurance for very low...

In a major contributions to behavioral economics, Loewenstein and Prelec (1992) set the foundations for the behavioral approach to decision making over time and derive the generalized hyperbolic discounting formula. Here we show that their assumption ‘common difference effect with quadratic...

Prospect theory is the main behavioral alternative to expected utility. Tversky and Kahnemann (1992) motivate the utility function for gains and losses under prospect theory by using the axiom of preference homogeneity. However, they do not provide the formal proof. We provide the relevant...

In a major contribution, Loewenstein and Prelec (1992) (LP) set the foundations for the behavioral approach to decision making over time. We show that the LP theory is incompatible with two very useful classes of value functions: the HARA class and the constant loss aversion class. Resultingly,...