The origin of prospect theory is the desire to test the intuitive statistician in the real world. The development of this theory by the cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky can be traced to the formers work in cognitive psychophysics, in which deviations from average behavior are termed...

Kahneman and Tversky and their behavioral economics stand in a long tradition of applying mathematics to human behavior. In the seventeenth century, attempts to describe rational behavior in mathematical terms run into problems with the formulation of the St. Petersburg paradox. Bernoulli’s...

The power to take game is a simple two player game where players are randomly divided into pairs consisting of a take authority and responder. Both players in each pair have earned an own income in an individual real effort decision-making experiment preceding the take game. The game consists of...

We investigate experimentally whether emotions affect bidding behavior in a first price auction. To induce emotions, we confront subjects after a first auction series with a positive or negative random economic shock. We then explore the relation between emotions and bidding behavior in a second...

This paper provides an overview of the work of Herbert Simon and his ideas about rational decision making. By his own standards, Simon is an economist who works in the tradition of Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The central theme in Simon’s research is how human beings organize themselves in...

From the viewpoint of the independence axiom of expected utility theory, an interesting empirical dynamic choice problem involves the presence of a “global risk,” that is, a chance of losing everything whichever safe or risky option is chosen. In this experimental study, participants have to...

Although reciprocity is a key concept in the social sciences, it is still unclear why people engage in costly reciprocation. In this study, physiological and self-report measures were employed to investigate the role of emotions, using the Power-to-Take Game. In this 2-person game, player 1 can...

Estimation of the volatility of time series has taken off since the introduction of the GARCH and stochastic volatility models. While variants of the GARCH model are applied in scores of articles, use of the stochastic volatility model is less widespread. In this article

Estimation of the volatility of time series has taken off since the introduction of the GARCH and stochastic volatility models. While variants of the GARCH model are applied in scores of articles, use of the stochastic volatility model is less widespread. In this article it is argued that one...