The daunting complexity of important financial decisions can lead to procrastination. We evaluate a low-cost intervention that substantially simplifies the retirement savings plan participation decision. Individuals received an opportunity to enroll in a retirement savings plan at a pre-selected...

We investigate profit-maximizing versioning plans for an information goods monopolist. The analysis employs data obtained from a web-based field experiment in which potential buyers were offered information goods in varied price-quality configurations. Maximum simulated likelihood (MSL) methods...

We conduct a proper test of the claim that people are overconfident, in the sense that they believe that they are better than others. The results of the experiment we present do not allow us to reject the hypotheses that the data has been generated by perfectly rational, unbiased, and...

Many studies have shown that people display an apparent overconfidence. In particular, it is common for a majority of people to describe themselves as better than average. The literature takes for granted that this better-than-average effect is problematic. We argue, however, that, even...

A century ago, Thorstein Veblen introduced socially contingent consumption into the economic literature. This paper complements the scarce empirical literature by testing his conjecture on South African household data and finds that Black and Coloured households spend relatively more on visible...

Consumer adoption and usage of mobile communication and multimedia content services has been growing steadily over the past few years in many countries around the world. In this paper, we develop and estimate a structural model of user behavior and learning with regard to content generation and...

In this paper we conduct two proper tests of overconfidence. We reject the hypothesis "the data cannot be generated by a rational model" in both experiments.

An Operational Approach for Evaluating Investment Risk: An Application to the No-Till Transition Abstract: Roy’s safety-first rule is used to provide measures popular with farmers of short and long term business risk associated with various no-till transition strategies over an investment...

I discuss the measurement of world poverty and inequality, with particular attention to the role of purchasing power parity (PPP) price indexes from the International Comparison Project. Global inequality increased with the latest revision of the ICP, and this reduced the global poverty line...