We examine an economy in which the cost of consuming some goods can be reduced by making commitments that reduce flexibility. We show that such consumption commitments can induce consumers with risk-neutral underlying utility functions to be risk averse over small variations in income, but...

There is an increasing interest in the concept of social exclusion and the related concept of social isolation and their potential role in understanding inequality. We examine the degree to which voluntary separation from social activities during adolescence affects adult wages. It is well-known...

Over the past two decades the venture capital industry became a major focus for the financial media. With potential for high rates of return, this industry attracts entrepreneurs looking for opportunities to invest. While some investments are successful and highly publicized, many are not. This...

Taller workers receive a wage premium. Net of differences in family background, the disparity is similar in magnitude to the race and gender gaps. We exploit variation in an individual’s height over time to explore how height affects wages. Controlling for teen height essentially eliminates...

Economic theory reduces the concept of rationality to internal consistency. The practice of economics, however, distinguishes between rational and irrational beliefs. There is therefore an interest in a theory of rational beliefs, and of the process by which beliefs are generated and justified....

We study an individual who faces a dynamic decision problem in which the process of information arrival is unobserved by the analyst. We derive a sequence of representations of preferences over menus of acts that capture the individual's uncertainty about his future beliefs. Using the most...

Savage (1954) provided a set of axioms on preferences over acts that were equivalent to the existence of an expected utility representation. We show that in addition to this representation, there is a continuum of other .expected utility.representations in which for any act, the probability...

We study a decision maker who faces a dynamic decision problem in which the process of information arrival is subjective. By studying preferences over menus of acts, we derive a sequence of utility representations that captures the decision maker’s uncertainty about the beliefs he will hold...

Machina (2009, 2012) lists a number of situations where standard models of ambiguity aversion are unable to capture plausible features of ambiguity attitudes. Most of these problems arise in choice over prospects involving three or more outcomes. We show that the recursive non-expected utility...

Consider an agent who is unsure of the state of the world and faces computational bounds on mental processing. The agent receives a sequence of signals imperfectly correlated with the true state that he will use to take a single decision. The agent is assumed to have a finite number of "states...