We consider the question whether top tennis players in a top tournament (Wimbledon) employ an optimal (efficient) service strategy. We show that top players do not, in general, follow an optimal strategy, and we provide a lower bound of the inefficiency. The inefficiency regarding winning a...

This paper provides an overview of the work of Herbert Simon and his ideas about rational decision making. By his own standards, Simon is an economist who works in the tradition of Adam Smith and Alfred Marshall. The central theme in Simon’s research is how human beings organize themselves in...

Kahneman and Tversky and their behavioral economics stand in a long tradition of applying mathematics to human behavior. In the seventeenth century, attempts to describe rational behavior in mathematical terms run into problems with the formulation of the St. Petersburg paradox. Bernoulli’s...

Purpose: This paper addresses the nature, formalization, and neural bases of (affective) social ties anddiscusses the relevance of ties for health economics. A social tie is defined as an affectiveweight attached by an individual to the well-being of another individual...

This paper analyses the role of information in the search process. Ibuild a simple model of a good with two random attributes with somejoint probability distribution. I consider seemingly unimportant changesin this distribution, i.e. changes which neither affect expected utility norits variance....

The origin of prospect theory is the desire to test the intuitive statistician in the real world. The development of this theory by the cognitive psychologists Kahneman and Tversky can be traced to the former's work in cognitive psychophysics, in which deviations from average behavior are termed...

This paper reviews three distinct strategies in recent economics for using the concept of social identity in the explanation of individual behavior: Akerlof and Kranton’s neoclassical approach, Sen’s commitment approach, and Kirman et al.’s complexity approach. The primary focus is the...

We test whether markets are needed to mitigate the effects of anchoring on peoples' pref- erences. We anchor subjects by asking them if they are willing to sell a bottle of wine for a transparently uninformative random price. We elicit subjects' Willingness-To-Accept for the bottle before and...

We provide estimates of the rebound effect for car transport in Denmark, using a rich data set with individual household data on car use, fuel efficiency, and car as well as household characteristics. A demand model is estimated in first differences; the availability of households in the sample...

We study the trip scheduling preferences of train commuters in a real-life setting. The underlying data have been collected during large-scale peak avoidance experiment conducted in the Netherlands, in which participants could earn monetary rewards for traveling outside peak hours. The...