Though economists assume that intertemporal preferences are time-consistent, evidence suggests that a person's relative preference for well-being at an earlier moment over a later moment increases as the earlier moment gets closer. We explore the beh avioral and welfare implications of such...

In active investment climates where firms sequentially improve each other's products, a patent can terminate either because it expires or because a noninfringing innovation displaces it in the market. The patent breadth and patent life together determine which of these occurs first. We...

This paper explores some of the ways that economists can incorporate insights from recent research combining psychology and economics to help understand risky behavior by adolescents.<BR> June 2000<BR> 1 <A HREF="econ/E00-285_fig.pdf">Figure .pdf</A><BR>

JEL#: A12, B49, D11, D91, E21<BR> Keywords: Addiction, consumption, cooling off, misprediction, projection bias, reference dependence<BR> People underappreciate how their own behavior and exogenous factors affect their future utility, and thus exaggerate the degree to which their future preferences...

Psychological research indicates that people have a cognitive bias that leads them to misinterpret new information as supporting previously held hypotheses. We model such confirmatory bias in a symmetric model in which exactly one of two hypotheses is true. We show that the confirmatory bias...

Many standard solution concepts rule out those Nash equilibria that are susceptible to deviations. We propose a framework for considering not only which equilibria are not susceptible to deviations, but also which equilibria are likely to persist in the long run because they are repeatedly...

JEL#: A12, B49, C70, D11, D60, D74, D91, E21<BR> Keywords: choice, naivete, partial naivete, present-biased preferences, procrastination, self control, sophistication, time inconsistency<BR> Recent models of procrastination due to self-control problems assume that a procrastinator considers just one...