During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped tobring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics.Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choicetradition – and, indirectly, of behaviorism – we...

Economic theory has evolved without paying proper attention to behavioral approaches,especially to social, economic, and cognitive psychology. This has recently changed byincluding behavioral economics courses in many doctoral study programs. Although thisnew development is most welcome, the...

In a recently published article, Bruni and Stanca (2008) suggest that television viewing has a negative impact on life satisfaction. In this note we argue that the empirical approach they use (an approach that omits the main effect of TV viewing in life satisfaction) is problematic.We estimate a...

We study the influence of gender on economic decision making in a two-person bargaining game. By testing hypotheses derived from evolutionary psychology and social role theory, we find that (1) gender per se has no significant effect on behavior, whereas (2) gender pairing systematically affects...

We study time preferences in a real-effort experiment with a one-month horizon. We report thattwo thirds of choices suggest negative time preferences. Moreover, choice reversal over time iscommon even if temptation plays no role. We propose and measure three distinct concepts ofchoice reversal...

The notion of choice inconsistency is widely spread in the literature on behavioraleconomics. Several approaches were used to account for the observation that peoplereverse their choices over time. This paper aims to explain the formation of resolutionsregarded as internal self-binding devices....

The satisficing approach is generalized and applied to finite n-person games.Based on direct elicitation of aspirations, we formally define the conceptof satisficing, which does not exclude (prior-free) optimality but includesit as a border case. We also review some experiments on strategic...

Theoretically and experimentally, we generalize the analysis of acquiringa company (Samuelson and Bazerman 1985) by allowing for competition ofboth, buyers and sellers. Naivety of both is related to the idea that higherprices exclude worse qualities. While competition of naive buyers...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have toadjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on.This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial.We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that...

We propose an experimental design allowing a behavioral test of the axiom ofcompleteness of individual preferences. The central feature of our design consistsin enabling subjects to postpone commitment at a small cost. Our main result isthat preferences are significantly incomplete. We use...