According to prospect theory (Kahneman & Tversky, 1979), gains and losses are measured from current wealth, which serves as a reference point. We attempted to ascertain to what extent the reference point shifts following gains or losses. In questionnaire studies we asked subjects what stock...

It is well-known that expected utility (EU) has empirical deficiencies. Prospect theory (PT) has developed as an alternative with more descriptive validity. However, PT’s full function had not yet been quantified in the health domain. This paper is the first to simultaneously measure utility...

This short paper is devoted to two items: 1) An analysis of Prelec’s weighting function at the probability p = 1 is highlighted (this analysis was performed by R. Duncan Luce in two articles with Ragnar Steingrimsson and János Aczél and here is referred to as the “Luce problem”). 2) The...

Procrastination is the notorious tendency to postpone work for tomorrow. This paper presents a formal model of procrastination based on expectations and prospect theory, which differs signficantly from the prevalent model of O’Donoghue and Rabin. Subject is assumed to work on a task for...

We examined prospect theory and reference point adaptation following gains or losses using participants from China, Korea, and the US. Supporting prospect theory, we found in Studies 1 and 2 that subjects from all three countries generally exhibited loss aversion and a greater propensity for...

The results in this paper are relevant for the application of valuation studies in cost-benefit analysis in the presence of the willingness to pay - willingness to accept gap. We consider a consumer who makes choices based on choice preferences exhibiting reference-dependence and loss aversion....

Experimental studies of search behavior suggest that individuals stop searching earlier than predicted by the optimal, risk-neutral stopping rule. Such behavior could be generated by two different classes of decision rules: rules that are optimal conditional on utility functions departing from...

Classic financial agency theory recommends compensation through stock options rather than shares to induce risk neutrality in otherwise risk averse agents. In an experiment, we find that subjects acting as executives do also take risks that are excessive from the perspective of shareholders if...

We systematically explore decision situations in which a decision maker bears responsibility for somebody else's outcomes as well as for her own in situations of payoff equality. In the gain domain we confirm the intuition that being responsible for somebody else's payoffs increases risk...

For many decades over the 20th Century, the mainstream of economics adopted a normative and axiomatic theory of individual behavior in which maximizing procedures were carried out by rationally unbounded agents. This status has been challenged on many grounds and alternative views from fields...