Much analysis in macroeconomics empirically addresses economy-wide incentives behind consumer/investment choices by using insights from the way a single representative household would behave. Heterogeneity at the micro level can jeopardize attempts to back up the representative consumer...

This paper is concerned with the axiomatic foundation of the revealed preference theory. Many well-known results in literature rest upon the ability to choose over budget sets that contains only 2 or 3 elements, the situations which are not observable in real life. In order to give a more...

Why do we love stories? That this is not an idle question is shown by the fact that we spend an enormous amount of time in our lives following stories: telling and listening to them; reading them; watching them on television or in films or on stage. Despite their recurrent similarity and even...

By revisiting Scitovsky's work on well-being, which introduces 'novelty' into the consumer's option set as a peculiar source of satisfaction, this paper finds a number of connections with the recent behavioural economics so as to open new lines on inquiry. First, similarly to behavioural...

Analyzing a large weekly retail transaction price dataset, we uncover a surprising regularity— small price increases occur more frequently than small price decreases for price changes of up to about 10 cents, while there is no such asymmetry for larger price changes. The asymmetry holds for...

The paper suggests that casting the choice problem in terms of alternative time-consuming activities can foster the fruitful cross-fertilization between economics and psychology along the lines suggested by Scitovsky in the Joyless Economy. The first part emphasizes how mainstream, utility-based...

Deflation is said to dampen aggregate demand because consumers would defer purchases while waiting for prices to fall further in the future. We explore the validity of this reasoning at the level of individual goods. Our findings suggest that the widespread concerns about impaired aggregate...

According to household production function theory households combine marketed goods and nonmarket environmental goods to produce service flows of direct value to the household. This readily explains why, as an input to household production activities, households might have preferences over the...

This paper examines the empirical relevance of the double dividend of revenue neutral marginal environmental tax reforms. For this purpose we use an extended version of the Ahmad-Stern model of indirect taxation. This version includes environmental externalities. We estimate the key parameters...