Social preference models were originally constructed to explain two things: why people spend money to affect the earnings of others and why the income of others influences reported happiness. We test these models in a novel experimental situation where participants face a risky decision that...

We show that if an agent is uncertain about the precise form of his utility function, his actual relative risk aversion may depend on wealth even if he knows his utility function lies in the class of constant relative risk aversion (CRRA) utility functions. We illustrate the consequences of this...

This paper proposes an analytical framework for scheduling decisions of road travelers that takes into account probability weighting using rank dependent utility theory. The fundamental difference with the standard scheduling model based on expected utility is that the probabilities of arrivals...

We present a theoretical framework which allows for the comparison of the effectiveness of tax measures, loans and funding, in supporting industry-oriented research. We estimate for each of the instruments the exact contribution required by a firm to decide on investing in R&D, given the costs...

This paper proposes that risk aversion encourages individuals to invest in balanced skill profiles, making them more likely to become entrepreneurs. By not having taken this possible linkage into account, previous research has underestimated the impacts both of risk aversion and balanced skills...

We ask individuals for their reservation price of a specified lottery and deduce their Arrow-Pratt measure of risk aversion. This allows direct testing of common hypotheses on risk attitudes in three datasets. We find that risk aversion indeed falls with income and wealth. Entrepreneurs are less...

This paper applies the dichotomous theory of choice by Zou (2000a) to the analysis of investment strategies and security markets. Issues concerning individual optimality, (approximate) arbitrage, capital market equilibrium, and Pareto efficiency are studied under various market conditions. <BR>...

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...

In experimental investigations of the effect of real incentives, accountability—the implicit or explicit expectation of a decision maker that she may have to justify her decisions in front of somebody else—is often confounded with the incentives themselves. This confounding of accountability...

Accident costs are an important component of the external costs of traffic, a substantial part of which is related to fatal accidents. The evaluation of fatal accident costs crucially depends on the availability of an estimate for the economic value of a statistical life. The aim of the current...