Subjects who overestimate their performance in experimental tasks unrelated to travel are less willing to insure against failing in the task and also less inclined to buy travel insurance. This suggests intrinsic optimism influences insurance demand and diminishes adverse selection.

The single decision maker chooses one of the actions repeatedly. She chooses the action with the highest weighted average of the past payoffs. In the long run either the action with highest expected payoff or the action with highest minimal payoff is chosen depending on how weights evolve.

We endogenize the trading mechanism selection in a model of directed search with risk averse buyers and show that the unique symmetric equilibrium entails all sellers using fixed price trading. Mechanisms that prescribe the sale price as a function of the realized demand (auctions, bargaining,...

This paper examines the effect of default options on choice behavior in experience-based decisions. To this end, we designed the “radio-button” experimental paradigm, in which participants are asked to set default options that remain effective until they decide to change them, and the...

There is a dearth of research on the determinants of in-kind redistribution. Using dynamic panel data estimations for 32 OECD countries, we show that the in-kind share of social benefits is lower under left-wing governments. This effect is weakened when left-wing governments respond to inflation...

In this paper, virtual implementation is restricted to deliver, on the equilibrium path, either a socially optimal outcome or a status quo: an outcome fixed for all preference profiles. Under such a restriction, for any unanimous and implementable social choice function there is a dictator, who...

The absence of simultaneous cycles is a sufficient condition for the existence of singleton cores. Acyclicity in the preferences of either side of the market is a minimal condition that guarantees the existence of singleton cores.

In the problem of allocating workers to different projects, where each project needs a minimum number of workers assigned to it, the serial dictatorship mechanism is neither strategy proof nor Pareto efficient. We therefore propose a strategy-proof and Pareto-efficient mechanism.

This paper is concerned with the problem of extending an antisymmetric binary relation on a set to a linear order on the power set. A necessary and sufficient condition is offered.

In this paper we consider maximum likelihood estimation in some exact and inexact linear rational expectation (LRE) models. The implications of the two models on the coefficients of the vector autoregressive (VAR) model are spelled out. The inexact version is more complicated and possible...