The ability to uncover preferences from choices is fundamental for both positive economics and welfare analysis. Overwhelming evidence shows that choice is stochastic, which has given rise to random utility models as the dominant paradigm in applied microeconomics. However, as is well known, it...

This paper studies how managers plan under uncertainty. In a new survey panel on German manufacturing firms, we show that uncertainty reflects change: Planning incorporates higher subjective uncertainty about future sales growth when the firm has just experienced unusual growth, and more so if...

This paper tests the ability of popular New Keynesian models, which are traditionally used to study monetary policy and business cycles, to match the data regarding a key channel for monetary transmission: the dynamic interactions between macroeconomic variables and their corresponding...

Robust decision making implies welfare costs or robustness premia when the approximating model is the true data generating process. To examine the importance of these premia at the aggregate level we employ a simple two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model with human capital and introduce an...

Whether people seek or avoid risks on gambling, insurance, asset, or labor markets crucially depends on the skewness of the underlying probability distribution. In fact, people typically seek positively skewed risks and avoid negatively skewed risks. We show that salience theory of choice under...

Multiplicative growth processes that are subject to random shocks often have a skewed distribution of outcomes. In a number of incentivized laboratory experiments we show that a large majority of participants either strongly underestimate skewness or ignore it completely. Participants...

Students' choices in education can only be based on expected outcomes. Econometric models that infer expectations based on ex post outcomes impose a rational structure of expectations on school performance and post-graduation earnings. Direct surveys suggest much ignorance and fuzziness. We use...

We propose a heuristic switching model of an asset market where the agents' choice of heuristic is consistent with their individual risk aversion. They choose between a fundamentalist and a trend-following rule to form expectations about the price of a risky asset. Given their risk aversion,...

Using a new consumer survey dataset, we show that macroeconomic preferences affect expectations and economic decisions through different channels. While household expectations are on average inversely related to preferences, households with the same inflation or interest rate expectations can...

We develop interpretable, quantitative indices of the objective and subjective complexity of lottery choice problems that can be computed for any standard dataset. These indices capture the predicted error rate in identifying the lottery with the highest expected value, where the predictions are...