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...

We characterize strategy sets that are closed under rational behavior (curb) in extensive games of perfect information and finite horizon. It is shown that any such game possesses only one minimal curb set, which necessarily includes all its subgame perfect Nash equilibria. Applications of this...

Most empirical studies assume only monotonic preferences for households. Behavioral research however provides substantial evidence that preferences for wealth are measured relative to a reference point. In this paper we introduce and solve a two-period consumption and savings model for a...

Recent research reveals that hedge fund returns exhibit a range of different, possibly non-linear pay-off patterns. It is difficult to qualify all these patterns simultaneously as being rational in a traditional framework for optimal financial decision making. In this paper we present a simple...

We examine the causal effect of commuting distance on workers' wages in a quasi-natural experiments setting using information on all workers in Denmark. We account for endogeneity of distance by using changes in distance that are due to firms' relocations. For the range of commuting distances...

This paper examines the conception of individuals as being of certain types in Harsanyi's transformation of games of incomplete information into games of complete information. It argues that while the conception of the individual in games of complete information offers potential advances over...

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...

We analyze the simplest Condorcet cycle with three players and three alternatives within a strategic bargaining model with recognition probabilities and costless delay. Mixed consistent subgame perfect equilibria exist whenever the geometric mean of the agents' risk coefficients, ratios of...

We assess whether public sector employees have a stronger inclination to serve others and are more risk averse than employees in the private sector. A unique feature of our study is that we use revealed rather than stated preferences data. Respondents of a large-scale survey were offered a...

This paper characterizes the optimal first-price auction (FPA) and second-price auction (SPA) for selling rights, contracts, or licenses that involve ensuing payoff uncertainty for the winning bidder. The distribution of the random payoff is common knowledge, except that bidders have private...