Afriat (1967) showed the equivalence of the strong axiom of revealed preference and the existence of a solution to a set of linear inequalities. From this solution he constructed a utility function rationalizing the choices of a competitive consumer. We extend Afriat's theorem to a class of...

We show how optimal saving in a two-period model is affected when prudence and risk aversion of the underlying utility function change. Increasing prudence alone will induce higher savings only if, for certain combinations of the interest rate and the pure time discount rate, there is...

This paper analyzes persuasive advertising and pricing in oligopoly if firms sell differentiated products and consumers have heterogeneous social attitudes towards the consumption by others. Deriving product demand from primitives, we show that the demand-enhancing effect of persuasive...

It has been argued that increased life expectancy raises the rate of return on education, causing a rise in the investment in education followed by an increase in lifetime labor supply. Empirical evidence of these relations is rather weak. Building on a lifecycle model with uncertain longevity,...

Standard media economics models imply that increased platform competition decreases ad levels and that mergers reduce per-viewer ad prices. The empirical evidence, however, is mixed. We attribute the theoretical predictions to the combined assumptions that there is no advertising congestion and...

Non-communicable diseases (NCDs) cause about 71% of all deaths globally and a considerable increase in health care costs. To tackle this problem, several Governments have designed "sin taxes", i.e, extra payments related to the quantity of unhealthy contents of specific goods. However, unhealthy...

Two duopolists compete in price on the market for a homogeneous product. They can 'profile' consumers, i.e., identify their valuations with some probability. If both firms can profile consumers but with different abilities, then they achieve positive expected profits at equilibrium. This...

Literature in economics and psychology on moral behaviour explores the contexts in which people act in ways that are consistent or inconsistent with their past actions. Such inconsistencies appear to violate economists' assumption of rational consumer behaviour. In this note we show that a...

In the seminal rational inattention model of Matĕjka and McKay (2015), logit demand arises from the discrete choice of agents who are uncertain about choice payoffs and who have access to a flexible, costly information acquisition technology (RI-logit). A notable limitation of this powerful...

This paper introduces a model of limited consumer attention into an otherwise standard new trade theory model with love-of-variety preferences and heterogeneous firms. In this setting, we show that trade liberalization needs not be welfare enhancing if the consumers' capacity to gather and...