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...

This article studies socially optimal allocations, from the point of view of a benevolent social planner, in environments characterized by fixed resources, endogenous fertility, and full information. Individuals in our environment are fully rational and altruistic toward their descendants. Our...

We provide an axiomatic justification to aggregate money metrics. The key axiom requires the approval of richer-to-poorer transfers that preserve the overall efficiency of the distribution. This transfer principle - together with the basic axioms of anonymity, continuity, monotonicity, and a...

We introduce a game-theoretic model with switching costs and endogenous references. An agent endogenizes his reference strategy and then, taking switching costs into account, he selects a strategy from which there is no profitable deviation. We axiomatically characterize this selection procedure...

A long Utilitarian tradition has the ideal of equal regard for all individuals, both those now living and those yet to be born. The literature formalizes this ideal as asking for a preference relation on the space of infinite utility streams that is complete, transitive, invariant to finite...

A long Utilitarian tradition has the ideal of equal regard for all individuals, both those now living and those yet to be born. The literature formalizes this ideal as asking for a preference relation on the space of infinite utility streams that is complete, transitive, invariant to finite...

When is a finite number of binary voting choices consistent with the hypothesis that the voter has preferences that admit a (quasi)concave utility representation? I derive necessary and sufficient conditions and a tractable algorithm to verify their validity. I show that the hypothesis that the...

We study two-stage choice procedures in which the decision maker first preselects the alternatives whose values according to a criterion pass a menu-dependent threshold, and then maximizes a second criterion to narrow the selection further. This framework overlaps with several existing models...

When is a finite number of binary voting choices consistent with the hypothesis that the voter has preferences that admit a (quasi)concave utility representation? I derive necessary and sufficient conditions and a tractable algorithm to verify their validity. I show that the hypothesis that the...