We study a model of social learning and communication using hard anecdotal evidence. There are two Bayesian agents (a sender and a receiver) who wish to communicate. The receiver must take an action whose payoff depends on their personal preferences and an unknown state of the world. The sender...

Deferred Acceptance (DA), a widely implemented algorithm, is meant to improve allocations: under classical preferences, it induces preference-concordant rankings. However, recent evidence shows that—in both real, large-stakes applications and experiments—participants frequently play...

This paper is aimed to assess, with two lab experiments, to what extent Kőszegi and Rabin's (2006) model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences can explain Knetsch's (1989) endowment effect. Departing from past work, we design an experiment that treats the two goods (a mug and a...

Eligible participants in the U.S. Social Security system may claim benefits anytime from age 62-70, with benefit levels actuarially adjusted based on the claiming age. This paper shows that individual intentions with regard to Social Security claiming ages are sensitive to how the early versus...

Prospect theory, first described in a 1979 paper by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, is widely viewed as the best available description of how people evaluate risk in experimental settings. While the theory contains many remarkable insights, economists have found it challenging to apply these...

Life insurance is a large yet poorly understood industry. A final death benefit is not paid for a majority of policies. Insurers make money on customers that lapse their policies and lose money on customers that keep their coverage. Policy loads are inverted relative to the dynamic pattern...

Domestic attempts to use financial incentives for teachers to increase student achievement have been ineffective. In this paper, we demonstrate that exploiting the power of loss aversion--teachers are paid in advance and asked to give back the money if their students do not improve...

We document that prior portfolio choices influence investors' expectations about asset values, and their future choices. We find that people update more from information consistent with their prior choices, leading to sticky portfolios over time. These effects are related to how the brain's...

Economists commonly suppose that persons have probabilistic expectations for uncertain events, yet empirical research measuring expectations was long rare. The inhibition against collection of expectations data has gradually lessened, generating a substantial body of recent evidence on the...

The theory of expected utility maximization (EUM) explains risk aversion as due to diminishing marginal utility of wealth. However, observed choices between risky lotteries are difficult to reconcile with EUM: for example, in the laboratory, subjects' responses on individual trials involve a...