There is an apparent rift between the way banks calculate and the way humans think.On the one hand, exponential discounting has played a centuries-long, lead role in financial analysis. On the other hand, experiments by behavioral economists demonstrate that hyperbolic discounting is better than...

The literature suggests that human perception and behavior vary with physical temperature. Weprovide an experimental test of how different ambient temperature conditions impact socialbehavior and social perception: Subjects went through a series of tasks measuring various aspectsof social...

The literature reports a tendency that future losses are discounted less than future gains, the so-called sign effect in intertemporal decision making. In this article, we study implications of the sign effect on risk taking: If future losses are discounted less than future gains, mixed...

The cornerstone of mainstream economic theory is the premise of rationality. Humans are assumed to be rational economic agents who, subject to the available information and limited resources, are able to select, among a set of alternatives, the best means to maximize their ends and their...

I estimate the effects of collaborative and adversarial intergroup contact. I randomly assigned Indian men from different castes to participate in cricket leagues or to serve as a control group. League players faced variation in collaborative contact, through random assignment to...

We validate experimentally a new survey item to measure the preference for competition. The item, which measures participants' agreement with the statement "Competition brings the best out of me", predicts individuals' willingness to compete in the laboratory after controlling for their ability,...

Two well-known violations of Expected Utility Theory (EUT) are the Allais Paradox and the preference reversal between gamble choices and gamble bids. The Allais Paradox undermines the independence axiom, according to which the preferences for two gambles should be unaffected by an independent...

Diversification is a fundamental concept in economics, decision theory and finance. It also lies at the core of the Darwinian evolution argument, and diversifying behavior known as bet-hedging has been widely documented in other species. The central premise of this paper is that attitudes...

Errors in probabilistic reasoning have been the focus of much psychology research and are among the original topics of modern behavioral economics. This chapter reviews theory and evidence on this topic, with the goal of facilitating more systematic study of belief biases and their integration...

Hyperbolic discounting and lack of self-control are different phenomena that share the property of dynamic inconsistency. Despite being different, these two concepts have been extensively conflated and confused in Economics. I review the definitions and properties of both concepts, the...