Luckman et al. (2018) experimentally tested the conjecture that a single model of risky intertemporal choice can account for both risky and intertemporal choices, and under the conditions of their experiment, found evidence supporting it. Given the existing literature, that is a remarkable...

Over the past decades psychological theories have made significant headway into economics, culminating in the 2002 (partially) and 2017 Nobel prizes awarded for work in the field of Behavioural Economics. Many of the insights imported from psychology into economics share a common trait: the...

We study a setting where a buyer chooses one of several available options whose values are initially unknown but can be discovered through costly search. Search is sequential, with perfect recall, which implies it is optimal for the buyer to search until the best option encountered so far...

Heuristics are all around us, both in the real world and the literature. There are many of them and there are many — too many — definitions of them. In this chapter we focus on the history of fast and frugal heuristics, as sketched out comprehensively in Gigerenzer, Todd, & the ABC Research...

Retirement saving is an area now jam-packed with defaults meant to address delayed or absent decision making. Yet, getting individuals engaged with retirement saving decisions is critical to avoid unsuitable one-size-fits-all defaults and optimise accumulated wealth. We apply a...

The Allais Paradox, or Common Consequence Effect to be precise, is one of the most well-known behavioral regularities in individual decision making under risk. A common perception in the literature, which motivated the development of numerous generalized non‐expected utility theories, is that...

In his History of Economic Analysis, Joseph Schumpeter (Schumpeter 1954a) dismissed Adam Smith's Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (Smith 1976) in a blunt and ad hominem manner. We argue that Schumpeter's assessment resulted from his failure to appreciate the rhetorical structure of...

Widely accepted as a low-cost, fast-turnaround solution with acceptable validity, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (MTurk) is increasingly being used to source participants for academic studies. Yet two commonly raised concerns remain: the presence of quasi-professional respondents, or...

Background: Infertility affects one in eight couples worldwide. In vitro fertilization (IVF) is now considered a mainstream fertility treatment to increase the chance of conceiving a child in infertile individuals. The main cause of infertility is advanced female age due to the number and...

Adam Smith’s view of the proper role for government in commercial societies remains a source of debate. Here we sketch out in simple game-theoretic terms the numerous public-goods provision and externalities problems on display in particular in Book V of The Wealth of Nations. Casting these...