In an often quoted article, Genesove and Mayer (2001) observe that house sellers are reluctant to sell at a loss, and attribute this finding to loss aversion. I show that loss aversion cannot explain this phenomenon.

I show that a loss averse consumer who must share her budget between two goods prefer allocations for which consumption equals reference point for at least one good. The phenomenon intensity depends on the curvature of the utility curve. These results are consistent with several stylized facts...

This paper examines the determinants of tax evasion under prospect theory. For prospect theory, reference dependence is a fundamental element (the utility function depends on gains and losses relative to a reference point and not on final wealths as in expected utility theory). In order to...

The explanation of social inequalities in education is still a debated issue in economics. Recent empirical studies tend to downplay the potential role of credit constraint. This article tests a different potential explanation of social inequalities in education, specifically that social...

We investigate the relation between welfare and preference satisfaction in economics, and show that the extension of the scope of economic analysis through the 20th century forces economists to question the validity of the preference satisfaction criterion as a normative criterion for evaluating...

Background: Since the attribution of the Nobel prize in 2002 to Kahneman for prospect theory, behavioral finance has become an increasingly important subfield of finance. However the main parts of behavioral finance, prospect theory included, understand financial markets through individual...

This paper introduces a theoretical framework for collective decision making to describe fluctuations and transitions in financial markets. Investors are assumed to be boundedly rational, using a limited set of information including past price history and expectation on future dividends....

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

We use a US Social Security reform as a quasi-experiment to provide evidence on framing effects in retirement behavior. The reform increased the full retirement age (FRA) from 65 to 66 in two month increments per year of birth for cohorts born from 1938 to 1943. We find strong evidence that the...

We provide an economic interpretation of the practice consisting in incorporating risk measures as constraints in a classic expected return maximization problem. For what we call the infimum of expectations class of risk measures, we show that if the decision maker (DM) maximizes the expectation...