Motivated by the literature on ``choice overload'', we study a boundedly rational agent whose choice behavior admits a \textit{monotone threshold representation}: There is an underlying rational benchmark, corresponding to maximization of a utility function $v$, from which the agent's choices...

Considerable evidence shows that people have optimistic beliefs about future outcomes. I present an axiomatic model of wishful thinking (WT), in which an endowed alternative, or status quo, influences the agent's beliefs over states and thus induces such optimism. I introduce a behavioral axiom...

We address the following question: When can one person properly be said to be more delay averse than another? In reply, several (nested) comparison methods are developed. These methods yield a theory of delay aversion which parallels that of risk aversion. The applied strength of this theory is...

This paper extends the theory of temptation and self-control introduced by Gul and Pesendorfer (2001) to allow for increasing marginal costs of resisting temptation, that is, convex self-control costs. It also proves a representation theorem that admits a general class of self-control cost...

With complete information, choice of one option over another conveys preference. Yet when search is incomplete, this is not necessarily the case. It may instead reflect unawareness that a superior alternative was available. To separate these phenomena, we consider non-standard data on the...

Psychologists report that people make choices on the basis of "decision utilities'' that routinely overestimate the "experienced utility'' consequences of these choices. This paper argues that this dichotomy between decision and experienced utilities may be the solution to an evolutionary design...

When making choices, decision makers often either lack information about alternatives or lack the cognitive capacity to analyze every alternative. To capture these situations, we formulate a framework to study behavioral search by utilizing the idea of consideration sets. Consumers engage in a...

The transferable utility hypothesis underlies important theoretical results in household economics. We provide a revealed preference framework for bringing this (theoretically appealing) hypothesis to observational data. We establish revealed preference conditions that must be satisfied for...

We propose a model of 'choice overload,' which refers to a stronger tendency to select the default option in larger choice problems. Our main finding is a behavioral characterization of an asymmetric regret representation that depicts a decision maker who does not consider the possibility of...

I provide axiomatic foundations for a model of taste uncertainty with endogenous learning through consumption. In this setting, uncertainty is over an unobservable, subjective state space. Preference over lottery-menu pairs is sufficient to identify the state space and the learning process. In...