People across the developing world join rotational savings and credit associations (roscas) to fund repeated purchases of nondivisible goods. When the scope for punishment is weak, there is a natural question about why agents do not defect from these groups. I model a rosca as a commitment...

Self-esteem measures confidence in one’s abilities. Prior literature has shown that higher self-esteem can also affect individual financial decision making through an increased willingness to invest in risky assets and motivation to enhance self image through wealth accumulation. However,...

Economists have generally ignored the notion that perceived time may differ from clock time. Borrowing from the behavioral psychology literature, we investigate the case of time compression whereby perceived time passes more quickly than actual time. A framework is presented to embed time...

I incorporate expectations-based reference-dependent preferences into a dynamic stochastic model to explain three major life-cycle consumption facts; the intuitions behind these three implications constitute novel connections between recent advances in behavioral economics and prominent ideas in...

We propose a solution concept for games that are played among hyperbolic discounters that are possibly naive about their own, or about their opponent's future time inconsistency. Our perception-perfect equilibrium essentially requires each player to take an action consistent with the subgame...

People’s attachment to a subsidy creates difficulties for the government to phase out, and eventually eliminate, the subsidy. Elimination of fuel subsidy scheme in Indonesia is a perfect example of such occurrence. The subsidy has been implementing to commodity as opposed to households, thus...

We report experimental evidence on gender differences in financial decision that involves three depositors choosing between waiting or withdrawing their money from a common bank. We find that the position in the line, the fact of being observed and the observed decisions are key determinants to...

The paper attempts to test the following hypotheses: (i) Are people generally self interested, (ii) If people tend to be generous, what is the motive, i.e., either they fear rejection or do they have a preference for fairness, and (iii) Is there any behavioral difference in bargaining between...

This paper conducts a laboratory experiment to investigate the role of social connections in behavioral indirect reciprocity. We provide the evidence of spillovers effects of social ties, e.g., the recipient’s indirect reciprocal act varies with the relations between the donor and a third...

To study switching behavior, an experiment mimicking the state of a driver on the road was conducted. In each trial participants were given a chance to switch lanes. Despite the fact that lane switching had no sound rational basis, participants often switched lanes when the speed of driving in...