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...

It is shown how one can effectively use cross-section data in modelling the change over time in aggregate consumption expenditure of a heterogeneous population. The starting point of our aggregation analysis is a dynamic behavioral relation on the household level. Based on certain hypotheses on...

A series of properties of the distribution of income and aggregated expenditure on goods and services has been postulated by W. Hildenbrand (1994) and others to hold. In this paper we infer on these properties from the Spanish Family Budget Survey (EPF) of the years 1973, 1980, 1990, using...

We propose a simple mechanism that might improve voluntary contributions to public goods. Using a laboratory experiment we analyze how bundling public with private goods affects individuals' valuations for both goods. In the experiment, subjects may purchase a private and a public good either...

This paper attempts to find out the explanatory power of observed changes in the distribution of current income in explaining the relative change in aggregate consumption using the distributional approach of aggregation by Hildenbrand and Kneip (1999, 2001). The coefficients in the aggregate...

This paper attempts to provide empirical evidence of the positive definiteness of the mean income effect matrix, a sufficient condition for market demand to satisfy the {\it law of demand} derived by H\"{a}rdle, Hildenbrand and Jerison [HHJ(1991)]. Increasing heterogeneity in spending of...

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