This study test whether social reference points impact individual risk taking. In a laboratory experiment, decision makers observe the earnings of a peer subject before making a risky choice. We exogenously manipulate the peer earnings across two treatments. We find a signicant treatment effect...

In a multi-agent setting, individuals often compare own performance with that of their peers. These comparisons in?uence agents? incentives and lead to a noncooperative game, even if the agents have to complete independent tasks. I show that depending on the interplay of the peer effects,...

Many information structures generate correlated rather than mutually independent signals, the news media being a prime example. This paper shows experimentally that in such context many people neglect these correlations in the updating process and treat correlated information as independent. In...

We show that revealed preference tests, which allow a small degree of

The following question is analyzed: under what circumstances can one a stable (i.e., time invariant) functional relationship which links aggregate consumption in period t with aggregate income in period t and another "determinants" of consumtion that refer to periods prior to period t and can be...

The paper is about the economic modelling of aggregate consumption expenditure with particular emphasis on the distribution effects of income. Under certain assumptions on the evolution over time of the population of households ("structural stability") we shall derive a first order approximation...

By checking whether consumer demand satis es the axioms of revealed preference, one can test the empirical validity of the neoclassical theory of consumer behaviour. However, applying the axioms to actual consumer purchase data is di cult, if not impossible, since serious problems of both a...

It is shown how one can effectively use microdata in modelling the change over time in an aggregate (e.g. mean consumption expenditure) of a large and heterogeneous population. The starting point of our aggregation analysis is a specification of explanatory variables on the micro-level....