Evidence increasingly points to the importance of reference-dependence in predicting consumer behavior. We utilize detailed data from penny auctions, which first appeared as an internet phenomenon in the late 2000's, to uncover how consumers' prior experiences predict their willingness to try a...

How does an individual’s position within a social distribution influence their desire to take risk? Reference-dependent loss aversion (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Koszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007) adapted to a social distribution setting, suggests that individuals could find risk more appealing at...

How does an individual's position within a social distribution influence their desire to take risk? Reference-dependent loss aversion (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Koszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007) adapted to a social setting, suggests that individuals may find risk more appealing when they are doing...

Frequent online poker players with extensive experience calculating probabilities and expected values might be expected to behave as Expected Utility maximizers, in that small shocks to their wealth would not affect risk preferences (Rabin, 2000). By contrast, reference-dependent loss aversion...

We consider a large class of 2-contestant Colonel Blotto games, for which the budget and valuation are both asymmetric between players and the contest success functions are in Tullock form with battle-specific discriminatory power in (0, 1] and battle-and-contestant-specific lobbying...

We study the information design for effort maximization in a simultaneous two-player two-type all-pay auction contest environment, where players have private information about their own valuations. Full characterization of the optimal signal crucially rests on the notion of ridge distributions:...

We consider a large class of 2-contestant Colonel Blotto games, for which the budget and valuation are both asymmetric between players and the contest success functions are in Tullock form with battle-specific discriminatory power in (0, 1] and battle-and-contestant-specific lobbying...