A multiplicative form of the habit term in the utility function has some undesirable properties if the habit function is itself still additive (Wendner, 2003). A geometric form for the way the stock of habit accumulates can resolve these shortcomings.

We show that a steeply increasing workload before a deadline is compatible with time-consistent preferences. The key departure from the literature is that we consider a stochastic environment where success of effort is not guaranteed.

I put forward a concise and intuitive formula for the calculation of the valuation for a good in the presence of the expectation that further, related, goods will soon become available. This valuation is tractable in the sense that it does not require the explicit resolution of the consumer’s...

We quantify the welfare gains from better retirement planning using a model in which retirement planning is time inconsistent. A modest increase in a household’s planning horizon by just a few years generates large aggregate and individual welfare gains.

We present a multi-trial experiment that extends the classic experiment of Thaler et al. (1997) by adding short-term information to long-term investment. The allocation to the risky asset is reduced in the long-term, when we add short-term information.

We study the welfare implications of public information precision in a beauty contest framework allowing for optimal stabilization policies and information obfuscation. When policy makers’ ability to obfuscate information is constrained, increasing public information precision can be welfare...

This paper reports an experimental investigation of a trust game using either cash or class credit as incentives to participants. We recruit from two auditorium classes. In one class, each token has cash value; in the other, each token is worth extra-credit points added to the students’ overall...

This paper provides an analysis of solutions for allocation problems from an axiomatic point of view, proposing a decomposition for the space of such problems into direct sum of irreducible subspaces that are relevant to the study of linear symmetric solutions. In particular, we obtain...

We study a decentralized trading model as in Peters (1984a), where heterogeneous market participants face a trade-off between price and trade probability. We present a novel proof of existence of a unique demand vector in Nash equilibrium, based on a recursive approach that exploits the...