Given the worldwide concern that individuals are not saving sufficiently for retirement, many governments are taking action to try and rectify this tendency. A key focus area is implementing policies to dissuade individuals from accessing accumulated retirement funds when changing jobs. While...

The effect of frequency of subjective experience of price increases on perceived inflation, i.e. the subjective experience of general price development, is investigated. The paper presents a two-phased psychological model of perceived inflation: first, information about product price increases...

Most contemporary self-control theories share two core assumptions. They assume that indulgence is the default option in self-control decision situations, and that successful self-control requires top down interference, either in the form of willpower (direct top down interference) or in the...

Academics are divided as to whether financial risk tolerance is an enduring psychological trait and as a consequence is less likely to change over the life of an individual, or a variable psychological state which varies readily in response to internal and external influences. In this study we...

This theoretical paper presents an incentive salience model of intertemporal choice. The model is a variation of the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model. Based on the distinction between ‘wanting’ and ‘liking’, the paper presents one possible explanation of impulsive choices of smaller...

I study the behavior of individuals with present biased preferences who are involved in costly, long-run projects. By using generic cost and reward functions, I characterize the behaviors of the sophisticated, partial naive and naive types. It is shown that there may arise cases where naives...

Using a probit model, we estimated the role of emotional factors in determining household participation in the debt market, after controlling for such traditional economic predictors as age, level of education, income, wealth, and work status. A sample of 445 Caucasian subjects selected among...

We describe a simulated financial decision making task that requires the participant to make decisions, over the course of a life cycle, regarding how much of their income to consume immediately and how much to save for a later retirement phase in which no income will be generated. The savings...

A recent literature emphasizes that gender differences in the labor market may in part be driven by a gender gap in willingness to compete. However, whereas experiments in this literature typically investigate willingness to compete in private environments, real world competitions often have a...

Individual competitiveness is a personality trait of high importance. While substantial differences between individuals have been documented, the sources of this heterogeneity are not well understood. To contribute to this issue we conduct an incentivized field study with pre-school children. We...