Although gambling is primarily an economic activity, no single theory of the demand for gambles has gained wide-spread acceptance among economists. This paper proposes a simple model of the demand for gambling that is based on the standard economic assumptions that (1) resources are scarce and...

A number of studies show that there is a link between social comparison and high levels of household debt. However, the exact mechanisms behind this link are not yet well understood. In this paper, we perform a lab experiment designed to study the eff ects of social image concerns and peer...

Growing evidence indicates that utility over time is different from utility under risk. Hence, measuring intertemporal preferences (discounting and utility) exclusively from intertemporal choices is desirable. We develop a simple method for measuring intertemporal preferences. It is...

We investigate how intertemporal allocation of monetary rewards is influenced by the size of total budget, with a particular interest in the channels of influence. We find a significant magnitude effect: the budget share allocated to the later date increases with the size of the budget. At the...

Most economic decisions are embedded in a specific social context. In many such contexts, individual choices are influenced by their observability due to underlying social norms and social image concerns. This study investigates the impact of choices being observed, compared to anonymity of...

Dynamic consistency leads to Bayesian updating under expected utility. We ask what it implies for the updating of more general preferences. In this paper, we characterize dynamically consistent update rules for preference models satisfying ambiguity aversion. This characterization extends to...

Extensive evidence suggests that participants in the direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanism (DSPDA) play dominated strategies. In particular, students with low priority tend to misrepresent their preferences for popular schools. To explain the observed data, we introduce...

Despite the truthful dominant strategy, participants in strategy-proof me- chanisms submit manipulated preferences. In our model, participants dislike rejections and enjoy the confirmation from getting what they declared most desirable. Formally, the payoff from a match decreases in its position...

We develop and implement a new measure for inequality aversion: two peers are endowed with identical binary lotteries and the only choice they make is whether they want to play out the lotteries independently or with perfect positive correlation (coupling). Coupling has no other e ect than...

We test the effects of dual processing differences in both individual traits and decision states on risk taking. In an experiment with a large representative sample (N = 1,832), we vary whether risky choices are induced to be based on either emotion or reason, while simultaneously measuring...