Can a rational choice modeling framework help broaden our understanding of anorexia nervosa? This question is interesting because anorexia nervosa is a serious health concern, and because of the following issue: could a rational choice approach shed useful light on a condition which appears to...

Over 250 respondents--graduate students in law and public policy--assessed the risks of climate change and valued climate-change mitigation policies. Many aspects of their behavior were consistent with rational behavior. For example, respondents successfully estimated distributions of...

Revealed preferences are tastes that rationalize an economic agent's observed actions. Normative preferences represent the agent's actual interests. It sometimes makes sense to assume that revealed preferences are identical to normative preferences. But there are many cases where this assumption...

This paper discusses how the effects of taxes on economic behavior are important for revenue estimation, for calculating efficiency effects, and for understanding short-term macroeconomoic consequences. The primary focus is on taxes on labor income but some attention is given to taxes on income...

For voters with quot;socialquot; preferences, the expected utility of voting is approximately independent of the size of the electorate, suggesting that rational voter turnouts can be substantial even in large elections. Less important elections are predicted to have lower turnout, but a...

This paper discusses the role of annuities in retirement planning. It begins by explaining the basic theory underlying the individual welfare gains available from annuitizing resources in retirement. It then contrasts these findings with the empirical findings that so few consumers behave in a...

The research in Psychology and Economics (a.k.a. Behavioral Economics) suggests that individuals deviate from the standard model in three respects: (i) non-standard preferences; (ii) non-standard beliefs; and (iii) non-standard decision-making. In this paper, I survey the empirical evidence from...

Most economic analyses presume that there are limited differences in the prior beliefs of individuals, as assumption most often justified by the argument that sufficient common experiences and observations will eliminate disagreements. We investigate this claim using a simple model of Bayesian...