Many studies document failures of expected utility's key assumption, the independence axiom. Here, we show that independence can be decomposed into two distinct axioms - betweenness and homotheticity - and that these two axioms are necessary and sufficient for independence. Thus, independence...

Prior laboratory experiments have studied general equilibrium economies constructed from “induced preferences” for artificial goods. We introduce new methods that allow us to study economies constructed instead from subjects' actual, “homegrown" preferences. Our subjects reveal their...

This work reports an online experiment with a general-population sample examining the performance of budget-choice tasks for elicitation of risk attitudes. First, I compare the investment task of Gneezy and Potters (1997) with the standard choice- list method of Holt and Laury (2002), and...

Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, in contrast with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: consumers seek to signal that they have "good" moral values to themselves and...

Recent experimental studies suggest that risk aversion is negatively related to cognitive ability. In this paper we report evidence that this relation might be spurious. We recruit a large subject pool drawn from the general Danish population for our experiment. By presenting subjects with...

Several recent models of choice build on the idea that decision makers are more likely to choose an option if its attributes stand out compared to the attributes of the available alternatives. One example is the model of focusing by Köszegi and Szeidl (2013) where decision makers focus...

Firms often discourage certain categories of individuals from buying their products, seemingly at odds with typical assumptions about profit maximization. This paper provides a potential rationale for such firm behavior: Consumers seek to signal that they have "desirable" ideological values to...

We conduct a large scale randomized field experiment to study whether providing recipients - 42,454 Chinese households in a rural area - with information on the costs of a real decision they make can help to improve the quality of their choices. The decisions are of high financial impact, as the...

We analyze if female athletes differ from male athletes in their competitive behavior, using data from high jump and pole vault competitions. We estimate if female athletes use risky strategies as often as male athletes and whether or nor their returns to risky strategies differ. Returns to...

We study the transmission of risk attitudes in a unique survey of mothers and children in which both participated in an incentivized risk preference elicitation task. We document that risk preferences are correlated between mothers and children when the children are just 7 to 8 years old. This...