This paper presents a more realistic endogenous time preference model, incorporating the property that impatience decreases as consumption increases. The model overcomes a serious drawback of the existing model, which needs the assumption of increasing impatience. The new model is applied to the...

The real options approach is used to explain discounted utility anomalies as artifacts of the optimizing behavior of an individual with standard preferences, who perceives the utility from consumption in the future as uncertain. For this ndividual, waiting is valuable because uncertainty is...

We explain essentially all known discounted utility anomalies as artefacts of the optimizing behavior of an individual with a time- separable utility function, who perceives a good as a source of a stochastic consumption stream, and believes that she can wait for an optimal moment to buy or sell...

Time-consuming and costly religious rituals pose a puzzle for economists committed to rational choice theories of human behavior. We propose that religious rituals promote in-group trust and cooperation that help to overcome collective-action problems. We test this hypothesis on communal...

The in-group-out-group bias is among the most well documented and widely observed phenomenon in the social sciences. Despite its role in hiring decisions and job discrimination, negotiations, and conflict and competition between groups, economists have heretofore ignored the in- group-out-group...

We study the determinants of hiring gender discrimination in the French financial sector through a controlled experiment. We find that, on the one hand, the access differences to job interviews by women and men are primarily explained by the expectation of a maternity by young women and, on the...

This paper presents rigorous and direct tests of two assumptions relating to limited commitment and asymmetric information that current underpin current models of risk pooling. A specially designed economic experiment involving 678 subjects across 23 Zimbabwean villages is used to solve the...

We explore the role of reciprocity in wage determination by combining experimental and survey data. The experiment is similar to Berg, Dickhaut and McCabe's (1995) and is conducted with Ghanaian manufacturing workers. The survey relates to the same sample workers and the firms within which they...

This paper investigates whether expectations of trustworthiness and resulting acts of trust accord with an objective model of trustworthiness or are biased. Combining experimental and survey data, I find that Ghanaian workers appropriately take account of the religiousness of trustees, but...

Based on a model of two-stage life cycle, this paper investigates and measures intergerational relationships in lifetime earnings. Using data from PSID, I have found that the lifetime earnings transmission equation is non-linear. The elasticity of a son's lifetime earnings with respect to his...