stock market crash on hedging strategies by portfolio insurers, which dictated selling stocks as soon as prices fell. The fact that the practice of buying and selling stocks as portfolio insurance has virtually disappeared since then has given many comfort that a replay of the 1987 crash, when...

This paper analyzes the equilibrium play in a random matching model with a changing environment. Under myopic decision making, players adopt imitation strategies similar to those observed in evolutionary models with sampling from past play in the population. If the players are patient,...

To address the impact of regulation on ethical concerns of consumers, we study the example of minimum wages. In our experimental market, consumers have monopsony power, firms set prices and wages, and workers are passive recipients of a wage payment. We find that the majority of consumers...

Investors increasingly can obtain assistance from "robo-advisors," artificial intelligence - enabled digitalized service agents imbued with anthropomorphic design elements that can communicate using natural language. The present article considers the impact of anthropomorphized robo-advisors on...

We theoretically show that there is a fundamental disconnect be- tween the disposition effect, i.e., investors' tendency to sell winning assets too early and losing assets too late, and its common empirical measure, namely a positive difference between the proportion of gains and losses re-...

Traditionally, economic models have attributed procrastination to present bias. However, procrastination may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding motivated, overly optimistic beliefs about the workload they need to complete. This study provides a rigorous...

This paper studies if workers infer from correlation about causal effects in the context of the part-time wage penalty. Differences in hourly pay between full-time and part-time workers are strongly driven by worker selection and systematic sorting. Ignoring these selection effects can lead to...

This paper develops a theory in which heterogeneity in political preferences produces a partisan disagreement about objective facts. A political decision involving both idiosyncratic preferences and scientific knowledge is considered. Voters form motivated beliefs in order to improve their...

Measuring economic uncertainty is crucial for understanding investment decisions by individuals and firms. Macroeconomists increasingly rely on survey data on subjective expectations. An innovative approach to measure aggregate uncertainty exploits the rounding patterns in individuals' responses...

Many individuals have empathetic feelings towards animals but frequently consume meat. We investigate this "meat paradox" using insights from the literature on motivated reasoning in moral dilemmata. We develop a model where individuals form self-serving beliefs about the suffering of animals...