The authors develop and test a model to study the influence of inventory-on-hand and price-based reference points on the consumption rate of consumers. The model is motivated by recent theoretical and empirical research which suggests inventory pressure can cause consumers to increase...

The utility maximization problem of "ratchet investors" who do not tolerate any decline in their consumption rate is solved explicitly for all felicity functions in a Markovian framework which includes Brownian motion and Poisson processes as special cases. The optimal consumption plan turns out...

We extend the analysis of the intertemporal utility maximization problem for Hindy-Huang-Kreps utilities reported in Bank and Riedel (1998) to the stochastic case. Existence and uniqueness of optimal consumption plans are established under arbitrary convex portfolio constraints, including both...

We prove existence of an Arrow-Debreu equilibrium when agents' preferences exhibit local substitution in the sense of Hindy, Huang, and Kreps (1992). Efficient allocations and supporting price functionals are identified and characterized. Under Hindy Huang Kreps preferences, equilibrium price...

Many consumption prices are highly volatile. It would certainly overburden our cognitive system to fully adjust to all these changes. Households therefore often rely on simple heuristics when deciding what to consume, e.g. in the form of a constant budget share for a specific consumption...

The theory of industrial organization has experienced an impressive boom by using the methods of (non-cooperative) game theory. The conclusions depend, however. crucially on subtle details of the market decision processes about which there exist no or little empirical information. Studies of...

We investigate the relationship between inflation and price variation using highly disaggregated, weekly price data for consumption goods recorded in Germany during 1995, a low inflation period. We find a significant positive correlation between the rates of price change and price dispersion,...

When people decide about saving and consumption across the various periods of their life time they take into account their life expectancy when comparing present and future needs and resources for satisfying them. The experimental design, applied at two sites (Humboldt-University at Berlin and...