We studied the decision making process in the Dictator Game and showed that decisions are the result of a two-step process. In a first step, decision makers generate an automatic, intuitive proposal. Given sufficient motivation and cognitive resources, they adjust this in a second, more...

This paper exploits an unusual transportation setting to estimate the value of a statistical life (VSL). We estimate the trade-offs individuals are willing to make between mortality risk and cost as they travel to and from the international airport in Sierra Leone (which is separated from the...

Re-licensing requirements for professionals that move across borders are widespread. In this paper, we measure the returns to an occupational license using novel data on Soviet trained physicians that immigrated to Israel. An immigrant re-training assignment rule used by the Israel Ministry of...

We analyze the impact of an increase in the risk of divorce on the saving behaviour of married couples. From a theoretical perspective, the expected sign of the effect is ambiguous. We take advantage of the legalization of divorce in Ireland in 1996 as an exogenous increase in the likelihood of...

Some current utility models presume that people are concerned with their relative standing in a reference group. If this is true, do certain types care more about this than others? Using simple binary decisions and self-reported happiness, we investigate both the prevalence of ``difference...

Considerable experimental evidence suggests that non-pecuniary motives must be addressed when modeling behavior in economic contexts. Recent models of non-pecuniary motives can be classified as either altruism- based, equity-based, or reciprocity-based. We estimate and compare leading approaches...

This article introduces a model of rationality that combines procedural utility over actions with consequential utility over payoffs. It applies the model to the Prisoners’ Dilemma and shows that empirically observed cooperative behaviors can be rationally explained by a procedural utility for...

We analyze a mutual fire insurance mechanism used in Andorra, which is called La Crema in the local language. This mechanism relies on households' announced property values to determine how much a household is reimbursed in the case of a fire and how payments are apportioned among other...

Since ethical concerns are calling for more attention within Operational Research, we present three approaches to combine Operational Research models with ethics. Our intention is to clarify the trade-offs faced by the OR community, in particular the tension between the scientific legitimacy of...