A large literature shows that people discount financial rewards hyperbolically instead of exponentially. While discounting of money has been questioned as a measure of time preferences, it continues to be highly relevant in empirical practice and predicts a wide range of real-world behaviors,...

We provide experimental evidence that core intertemporal choice anomalies - including extreme short-run impatience, structural estimates of present bias, hyperbolicity and transitivity violations - are driven by complexity rather than time or risk preferences. First, all anomalies also arise in...

We consider the psychological and social foundations of human contributions and punishments in a voluntary contributions mechanism with punishment (VCMP). We eliminate 'dynamic economic linkages' between the two stages of our "modified" VCMP to rule out other potential explanations. We use a...

Ambiguous prospects are ubiquitous in social and economic life, but the psychological foundations of behavior under ambiguity are still not well understood. One of the most robust empirical regularities is the strong correlation between attitudes towards ambiguity and compound risk which...

Procrastination is often attributed to time-inconsistent preferences but may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding optimistic beliefs about their future effort costs. This study provides a rigorous empirical test for this notion of ‘motivated procrastination’....

We consider income-source-dependent tax evasion and show that this is a generalization of the well-known endowment effect. We show that loss aversion, moral costs, mental accounting, and risk preferences play a key role in explaining key features of source-dependent tax evasion. We provide...

This paper studies how litigation and settlement behavior is affected by agents motivated by spiteful preferences under the American and the English fee-shifting rule. We conduct an experiment and find that litigation expenditures and settlement requests are higher for more spiteful...

We report the results of an experiment on selective exposure to information. A decision maker interested in learning about an uncertain state of the world can acquire information from one of two sources which have opposite biases: when informed on the state, they report it truthfully; when...

When communicating numeric estimates with policymakers, journalists, or the general public, experts must choose between using numbers or natural language. We run two experiments to study whether experts strategically use language to communicate numeric estimates in order to persuade receivers....

Contrary to the traditional economic view that individuals misreport private information to maximize material payoffs, recent evidence highlights robust preferences for truth-telling among many decision-makers. Theoretical models that align with aggregate behavioral patterns posit that these...