Incentivized experiments are commonly used to estimate marginal rate of intertemporal substitution (MRS) in the lab and in the ?eld, and to make inferences about subject’s time preference. This paper considers the implications of an integrated model of behavior in which individuals are subject...

Overconfident: How Economic and Health Fault Lines Left the Middle East and North Africa Ill-Prepared to Face COVID This report examines the region's economic prospects in 2021, forecasting that the recovery will be both tenuous and uneven as per capita GDP level stays below pre-pandemic levels....

In many low- and middle-income countries, health coverage has improved dramatically in the past two decades, but health outcomes have not. As such, effective coverage-a measure of service delivery that meets a minimum standard of quality-remains unacceptably low. Improving Effective Coverage in...

This paper experimentally tests the predictions of a principal-agent model in which the agent has biased beliefs about his ability. Overconfident workers are found to earn lower wages than underconfident ones because they overestimate their expected payoff, and principals adjust their offers...

The neurotransmitter dopamine is central to the emerging discipline of neuroeconomics; it is hypothesized to encode the difference between expected and realized rewards and thereby to mediate belief formation and choice. We develop the first formal tests of this theory of dopaminergic function,...

The neurotransmitter dopamine has been found to play a crucial role in choice, learning, and belief formation. The best-developed current theory of dopaminergic function is the "reward prediction error" hypothesis-that dopamine encodes the difference between the experienced and predicted...

Many everyday decisions are made without full examination of all available options, and, as a result, the best available option may be missed. We develop a search-theoretic choice experiment to study the impact of incomplete consideration on the quality of choices. We find that many decisions...

We introduce and axiomatically characterize a model of status quo bias in which the status quo affects choices by both changing preferences and focusing attention. The resulting Limited Attention Status Quo Bias model can explain both the finding that status quo bias is more prevalent in larger...

People may be uncertain about future preferences, leading to both a preference for flexibility in choice between menus and stochastic choice from menus. This paper describes an experimental test of preference uncertainty in a realeffort task. We observe subjects’ preferences over menus of work...