How do human beings make decisions when, as the evidence indicates, the assumptions of the Bayesian rationality approach in economics do not hold? Do human beings optimize, or can they? Several decades of research have shown that people possess a toolkit of heuristics to make decisions under...

In a critique of the Loewenstein and Prelec [Loewenstein G., Prelec D., 1992. Anomalies in intertemporal choice: Evidence and an interpretation. The Quarterly Journal of Economics 107, 573-597] theory of intertemporal choice, [al-Nowaihi, A., Dhami, S., 2006. A note on the Loewenstein-Prelec...

In a seminal paper, Becker (1968) showed that the most efficient way to deter crime is to impose the severest possible penalty (to maintain adequate deterrence) with the lowest possible probability (to economize on costs of enforcement). We shall call this the Becker proposition (BP). The BP is...