This paper proposes foundations and a methodology for survey-based tracking of well-being. First, we develop a theory in which utility depends on "fundamental aspects" of well-being, measurable with surveys. Second, drawing from psychologists, philosophers, and economists, we compile a...

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, and this reduced the global poverty line...

Individuals must often choose among discrete actions with imperfect information about their payoffs. Before choosing, they have an opportunity to study the payoffs, but doing so is costly. This creates new choices such as the number of and types of questions to ask. We model these situations...

This paper develops axiomatically a revealed preference theory of reference-dependent choice behavior. Instead of taking the reference for an agent as exogenously given in the description of a choice problem, we suitably relax the Weak Axiom of Revealed Preference to obtain, endogenously, the...

An uncertainty-averse agent prefers betting on an event whose probability is known, to betting on an event whose probability is unknown. Such an agent may randomize his choices to eliminate the effects of uncertainty. For what sort of preferences does a randomization eliminate the effects of...

A model is proposed in which stochastic choice results from noise in cognitive processing rather than random variation in preferences. The mental process used to make a choice is nonetheless optimal, subject to a constraint on available information-processing capacity that is motivated by...

Expected consumer's surplus rarely represents preferences over price lotteries. Still, I give sufficient conditions for policies which maximize aggregate expected surplus to be interim Pareto Optimal. Besides two standard partial equilibrium conditions, I assume that feasible prices satisfy a...

Neuroeconomics strives to use knowledge from neuroscience to improve models of decisionmaking. Here we introduce a biologically plausible, drift-diffusion model that is able to jointly predict choice behavior and response times across different choice environments. The model has both normative...

This paper presents a sequential search model where consumers look for several products from multiproduct firms. Multiproduct search can significantly influence firms' pricing decisions. For example, it can make market prices decrease with search costs. Possible applications of the model are...