This paper is concerned with estimating preference functionals for choice under risk from the choice behaviour of individuals. We start from the observation that there is heterogeneity in behaviour between individuals and within individuals. By ‘heterogeneity between individuals’ we mean...

In this paper we examine the performance of theories of decision making under uncertainty/ambiguity from the perspective of their descriptive and predictive power, taking into account the relative parsimony of the various theories. To this end, we employ an innovative experimental design which...

This paper identifies, and tests experimentally, a prediction of Nash Bargaining Theory that may appear counterintuitive. The context is a simple bargaining problem in which two players have to agree a choice from three alternatives. One alternative favours one player and a second favours the...

This paper tests experimentally, in a common value setting, the equivalence between the Japanese English auction (or clock auction) and an open outcry auction, where bidders are allowed to call their own bids. We find that (i) bidding behaviour is different in each type of auction, but also that...

Representing ambiguity in the laboratory using a Bingo Blower (which is transparent and not manipulable) and asking the subjects a series of allocation questions (which are more efcient than pairwise choice questions), we obtain data from which we can estimate by maximum likelihood methods (with...

In the context of eliciting preferences for decision making under risk, we ask the question: "which might be the 'best' method for eliciting such preferences?". It is well known that different methods differ in terms of the bias in the elicitation; it is rather less well-known that different...

We report the results of an experimental investigation of a key axiom of economic theories of dynamic decision making – namely, that agents plan. Inferences from previous investigations have been confounded with issues concerning the preference functionals of the agents. Here, we present an...

There is a large theoretical literature in both economics and psychology on decision making under ambiguity (as distinct from risk) and many preference functionals proposed in this literature for describing behaviour in such contexts. However, the empirical literature is scarce and largely...

Dynamically inconsistent decision makers have to decide, implicitly or explicitly, what to do about their dynamic inconsistency. Economic theorists have identified three possible responses – to act naively (thus ignoring the dynamic inconsistency), to act resolutely (not letting their...

Jekyll and Hyde were in fact two people inside the same person – an obviously dynamically inconsistent person. In the book and in the movie, the dynamic inconsistency was resolved in arather dramatic way. We investigate its resolution in the laboratory.