The quasi-linear quadratic utility model is widely used in economics. The knowledge of its exact origin is less widespread. A first contribution of the paper is to explain the genesis of this model. Next, we review the main properties of the general model, mainly following the previous...

Two non-transitive theories to model decision making under risk are regret theory (Loomes and Sugden, 1982, 1987) and salience theory (Bordalo, Gennaioli, and Shleifer, 2012). While the psychological underpinning of these two approaches is different, the models share the assumption that...

This paper analyzes sin goods consumption when individuals exhibit present-focused preferences. It considers three types of present focus: present-bias with varying degrees of naiveté, Gul-Pesendorfer preferences, and a dual-self approach. We investigate the incentives to deviate from healthy...

We examine the effects of monetary policy on household self-assessed financial stress and durable consumption using panel data from eighteen annual waves of the British Household Panel Survey. For identification, we exploit random variation in household exposure to interest rates generated by...

The resurgence of inflation since the late 2021 is now accompanied by a reversal of prospects of growth, reviving fears of stagflation across the world (IMF 2022, World Bank 2022). In almost all accounts of the mounting stagflation threats a prominent role is played by the fall of households'...

In this paper we propose minority voting as a scheme that can partially protect individuals from the risk of repeated exploitation. We consider a committee that meets twice to decide about projects where the first-period project may have a long-lasting impact. In the first period a simple open...

In this paper, we reconsider the debate on Weitzman's (1998) suggestion to discount the long-run future at the lowest possible rate, referring to Gollier (2004) and Hepburn & Groom (2007). We show that, while Weitzman's use of the present value approach may indeed seem questionable, its outcome,...

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...

Consider a simple two-state risk with equal probabilities for the two states. In particular, assume that the random wealth variable Xi dominates Yi via ith-order stochastic dominance for i = M,N. We show that the 50-50 lottery [XN + YM, YN + XM] dominates the lottery [XN + XM, YN + YM] via (N +...

A key open question for theories of reference-dependent preferences is what determines the reference point. One candidate is expectations: what people expect could affect how they feel about what actually occurs. In a real-effort experiment, we manipulate the rational expectations of subjects...