Economic research by and large is dominated by a ‘rationality’ paradigm. Economic decision making within this paradigm is viewed as a maximising procedure. In general the latter represents the decision-making as a choice amongst a well defined set of alternatives. In this paper we question...

The paper presents a model of the evolution of social norms. When a norm is costly to follow and people do not derive benefits from following it except for avoiding social disapproval, the norm erodes over time. Tip percentages, however, increased over the years, suggesting that people derive...

The role of customer value has been largely recognized over time by the firms as an instrument towards stimulating market share and profit optimization. The customer values for a new product of firm in competitive markets are shaped more by habits, reinforcement effects, and situational...

Analyzing scanner price data that cover 27 product categories over an eight-year period from a large Mid-western supermarket chain, we uncover a surprising regularity in the data—small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases. We find that this asymmetry holds for price...

Five waves of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID), 1985-1989 including both wealth supplements, are used to construct an intertemporal budget constraint for selected single headed households. A new functional form of the dual consumer profit function rationalizing consumption, labor supply...

A central prediction of the quasi-hyperbolic model of time preference is that consumers will be impatient over short-run tradeoffs. I present the first nonlaboratory test of this implication using data on the nutritional intake of food stamp recipients. Caloric intake declines by 10 to 15...

Recent models of procrastination due to self-control problems assume that a procrastinator considers just one option and is unaware of her self-control problems. We develop a model where a person chooses from a menu of options and is partially aware of her self-control problems. This menu model...

In this paper I prove that a quasiconcave separable utility defined on an atomless space is concave.

Many transactions are now computer mediated, making it possible for sellers to condition their pricing on the history of interactions with individual consumers. This paper investigates conditions under which price conditioning will or will not be used. Our simplest model involves rational...

We study the influence of the female labor participation in the household expenditure allocation, considering the joint decision between consumption and leisure. The theoretical framework is a collective model in which the agents are the man and the woman and it is assumed that the result of...