Piracy in international waters is on the rise again, in particular off the coast of Somalia. While the dynamic game between pirates, ship-owners, insurance firms and the military seems to have reached some kind of equilibrium, piracy risks generating significant negative externalities to third...

Behavioral economics has shown that individuals sometimes make decisions that are not in their best interest. This insight has prompted calls for behaviorally-informed policy interventions popularized under the notion of libertarian paternalism. This type of soft paternalism aims at helping...

This paper presents a formal model in which differential satiation dynamics of various consumer needs translate into long-run changes of consumer behavior when income rises. In the model individuals allocate their income to the consumption categories proportional to need deprivation states...

The model of time-inconsistent procrastination by O'Donoughe and Rabin shows that individuals who are not aware of their present-bias (naïve) procrastinate more than individuals who are aware of it (sophisticated) or are not present-biased (time-consistent). This paper tests this prediction. We...

Recent experimental evidence suggests that donors are averse to giving to charities with high overhead ratios. This paper asks whether donors are also averse to giving to charities spending a high share of the donations on unavoidable administrative expenses. The results of an experiment with a...

We design and implement the first real-effort experiment that can jointly estimate present bias (Ø) and sophistication (bØ), with separate preference parameters for money (Øm, bØm) and effort (Øe, bØe). In our study, participants chose to (and predicted to) complete 14% (and 10%) fewer...

Behavioral economics has shown that individuals sometimes make decisions that are not in their best interests. This insight has prompted calls for behaviorally informed policy interventions popularized under the notion of "libertarian paternalism." This type of "soft" paternalism aims at helping...

This theoretical paper presents an incentive salience model of intertemporal choice. The model is a variation of the quasi-hyperbolic discounting model. Based on the distinction between wanting and liking, the paper presents one possible explanation of impulsive choices of smaller sooner rewards...

The paper deals with impulsive consumption and highlights the roles that cognitive and motivational aspects of reflexive thought (namely self-control and self-image motives, respectively) play in intertemporal decisions. While self-control inhibits individuals from consuming impulsively,...

Nudges, i.e., low-cost interventions that steer people's behavior without compromising their freedom of choice, are the key contribution of 'Libertarian Paternalism' (LP) to public policy. They typically work through either harnessing or responding to people's cognitive biases and heuristics -...