The concept of utility is often used in ambiguous ways in economics, from having substantive psychological connotations to being a formal placeholder representing a person's preferences. In the accounts of the early utilitarians, it was a multidimensional measure that has been condensed during...

The concept of 'utility' is often used in ambiguous ways in economics, from having substantive psychological connotations to being a formal placeholder representing a person's preferences. In the accounts of the early utilitarians, it was a multidimensional measure that has been condensed during...

Can one define and test the hypothesis of (un)bounded rationality in stochastic choice tasks without endorsing Bayesianism? Similar to the state specificity of assets, we rely on state-specific goal formation. In a given choice task, the list of state-specific goal levels is optimal if one...

Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisons one defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a framework for one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distribution individual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of)...

During the last three decades the ascent of behavioral economics clearly helped to bring down artificial disciplinary boundaries between psychology and economics. Noting that behavioral economics seems still under the spell of the rational choice tradition and, indirectly, of behaviorism we...

Recent literature has questioned the existence of a learning foundation for the partially cursed equilibrium. This paper closes the gap by showing that a partially cursed equilibrium corresponds to a particular analogy-based expectation equilibrium.

One of Keynes' core issues in his liquidity preference theory is how fundamental uncertainty affects the propensity to hold money as a liquid asset. The paper critically assesses various formal representations of fundamental uncertainty and provides an argument for a more boundedly rational...

On a heterogeneous experimental oligopoly market, sellers choose a price, specify a set-valued prior-free conjecture about the others' behavior, and form their own profit-aspiration for each element of their conjecture. We formally define the concepts of satisficing and prior-free optimality and...

The satisficing approach is generalized and applied to finite n-person games. Based on direct elicitation of aspirations, we formally define the concept of satisficing, which does not exclude (prior-free) optimality but includes it as a border case. We also review some experiments on strategic...

We study the nature of dominance violations in three minimalist dominance-solvable guessing games, featuring two or three players choosing among two or three strategies. We examine how subjects' reported reasoning translates into their choices and beliefs about others' choices, and how reasoning...