Several empirical studies provide evidence that their actual health state affects people's attitudes towards health and medical care in hypothetical health states. In the tradition of behavioural economics this paper considers the actual health state as a point of reference and builds a model...

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 study the endowment effect and expectation-based reference points in the field leveraging the setup of the Socio-Economic Panel. Households receive a small item for taking part in the panel, and we randomly assign respondents either a towel or a notebook, which they can exchange at the end of...

We study the heterogeneity of preferences regarding the limited substitutability of environmental public goods vis-a-vis private consumption goods and how it affects the economic valuation of environmental public goods. We show theoretically that mean marginal willingness to pay for an...

Using an extensive longitudinal dataset extracted from the Norwegian Prescription Database (NorPD) containing all prescriptions written in the period January 2004 to June 2007, we selected two particular drugs (chemical substances) used against cholesterol. The two brand-name products on the...

We propose a model of instrumental belief choice under loss aversion. When new information arrives, an agent is prompted to abandon her prior. However, potential posteriors may induce her to take actions that generate a lower utility in some states than actions induced by her prior. These losses...

We study the optimal design of information nudges for present-biased consumers who have to make sequential consumption decisions without exact prior knowledge of their long-term consequences. For arbitrary distributions of risk, there exists a consumer-optimal information nudge that is of cutoff...

Personal autonomy has been argued to be fundamental to well-being and is often discussed as an important driver of economic and political behavior. Yet, preferences for autonomy are not well understood, because their identification requires the separation of instrumental value attached to...

We study how individuals’ willingness to delegate choice is affected by heterogeneity in identity between the delegee and the delegate. While it is straightforward that such heterogeneity can affect delegation for instrumental reasons, we show experimentally that divergent identity also causes...