We investigate the relationship between violence and economic risk preferences in Afghanistan combining: (i) a two-part experimental procedure identifying risk preferences, violations of Expected Utility, and specific preferences for certainty; (ii) controlled recollection of fear based on...

Experimentally elicited discount rates are frequently higher than what seems reasonable for economic decision-making. Such high rates are often attributed to present-biased discounting. A well-known bias of standard measurements is the assumption of linear consumption utility. Attempting to...

This paper studies a New Keynesian business cycle model with agents who are averse to ambiguity (Knightian uncertainty). Shocks to confidence about future TFP are modeled as changes in ambiguity. To assess the size of those shocks, our estimation uses not only data on standard macro variables,...

The newsworthiness of an event is partly determined by how unusual it is and this paper investigates the business cycle implications of this fact. Signals that are more likely to be observed after unusual events may increase both uncertainty and disagreement among agents. In a simple business...

We use recruitment into a laboratory experiment in Kolkata, India to analyze how social networks select individuals for jobs. The experiment allows subjects to refer actual network members for casual jobs as experimental subjects under exogenously varied incentive contracts. We provide evidence...

We conduct an experiment assessing the extent to which people trade off the economic costs of truthfulness against the intrinsic costs of lying. The results allow us to reject a type-based model. People's preferences for truthfulness do not identify them as only either "economic types" (who care...

Some researchers have argued that anchoring in economic valuations casts doubt on the assumption of consistent and stable preferences. We present new evidence that explores the strength of certain anchoring results. We then present a theoretical framework that provides insights into why we...

This paper describes a series of laboratory experiments studying whether the form in which items are displayed at the time of decision affects the dollar value that subjects place on them. Using a Becker-DeGroot auction under three different conditions — (i) text displays, (ii) image displays,...

We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, utilitarian aggregation necessitates a present bias. In lab experiments three quarters of "social planners" exhibited present biases, and...

Decision makers tend to exhibit a higher degree of impatience when considering a delay to an immediate reward than when contemplating an identical delay to an equal future reward. This work argues that diminishing impatience originates from the distinction between the certain present and the...