This paper experimentally examines behavior in a two-player game of attack and defense of a weakest-link network of targets, in which the attacker's objective is to successfully attack at least one target and the defender's objective is diametrically opposed. We apply two benchmark contest...

It is entirely appropriate that the study of public finance take seriously "behavioral" inconsistencies with traditional models of individual and collective decision-making. This raises the question of whether the state should play a role in protecting individuals from themselves, and whether...

According to Chen's (2013) linguistic-savings hypothesis, languages which grammatically separate the future and the present (like English or Italian) induce less future-oriented behavior than languages in which speakers can refer to the future by using present tense (like German). We complement...

Using a unique dataset on health club attendance from Quebec, we look at the relationship between actual and expected attendance and how these relate to a reported measure of self-control problems at the time of contract signing. We find that a large majority of contract choices appear...

According to the endowment effect there is some discomfort associated with giving up a good, that is to say, we are willing to give up something only if the price is greater than the price we are willing to pay for it. This implies that the indifference curves should designate a reference point...

Over the past 20 years, macroeconomists have incorporated more and more results from behavioral economics into their models. We argue that doing so has helped fixed deficiencies with standard approaches to modeling the economy — for example, the counterfactual absence of inertia in the...

Paternalism is an attempt to influence individuals' decisions for their own benefit, even if there are no third parties involved. This seems to contradict normative individualism, which provides the general orientation to our modern democracies. Soft or libertarian paternalism accepts the...

We explore the individual and joint explanatory power of concepts from economics, psychology, and criminology for criminal behavior. More precisely, we consider risk and time preferences, personality traits from psychology (Big Five and locus of control), and a self-control scale from...

A nudge is a non-coercive paternalistic intervention that attempts to improve choices by manipulating the framing of a decision problem. As any paternalism, it faces the difficulty of determining the appropriate welfare criterion. We propose a welfare-theoretic foundation for nudging similar in...

This paper studies how imposing norms on contribution behavior affects individuals' intrinsic motivation. We consider the church levy, which the Catholic Church in Germany collects as a charitable donation, despite the fact that the levy is legally a tax. We design a randomized field experiment...