This paper offers an information-based model of social interaction, and analyzes optimal investment and pricing of services that facilitate interaction in a duopoly. Agents have uncertainty over their preferences but are aware that they are correlated with others’, so there exists an incentive...

Using online price comparison and shopping platforms makes experiencing slow connections, lags and waiting times for information an unfortunate reality. However, little attention has been paid to analyzing the effects of such delayed display of information on product choice behavior. This...

Many organizations rely on the skills of innovative individuals to create value, including academic and government institutions, think tanks, and knowledge-based firms. Roughly speaking, workers in these fields can be divided into two categories: specialists, who have a deep knowledge of a...

Although rational consumers without bequest motives are better off investing exclusively with annuitized instruments in partial equilibrium, we demonstrate the welfare effect of annuitization is ambiguous in general equilibrium on account of pecuniary externalities. Absent institutional...

Psychologists have described the working of the human brain as a combination of two systems – a dual process model. One system is intuitive and automatic (System 1) and the other is reflective and rational (System 2). To determine what insights this model has for stigma – such as fears of...

When an individual's preferences depend on the time or ‘frame’ at which decisions are made, the preferences that appear at different frames must be aggregated in order to make social decisions. Suppose we aggregate each individual i's frame-based preferences with a ‘behavioral welfare...

There is a schism within economics between the neoclassical and behavioral schools. A primary cause of the behavioral ascent is the experimental evidence of deviations between actual behavior and the neoclassical prediction of behavior. While behavioral scholars have documented these...

We demonstrate that upward-looking comparisons induce “keeping up with the richer Joneses”-behaviour. Using data from the German Socio-Economic Panel, we estimate the effect of reference consumption, defined as the consumption level of all households who are perceived to be richer, on...

This paper models Continuous Workout Mortgages (CWMs) in an economic environment with refinancings and prepayments. CWMs are home loans whose balance and payments are indexed using a market-observable house price index of the pertaining locality. Our main results include: (a) explicit modelling...

This paper provides a formal analysis of persuasive advertising when firms compete for consumers with heterogenous social attitudes towards the consumption by others. Deriving product demand from primitives, we show that the demand-enhancing effect of persuasive advertising varies across...