A relationship between lying behavior and social preferences has often been proposed in explaining patterns of lying aversion (ex. Erat and Gneezy, 2012; Houser, Vetter and Winter, 2012; Maggian and Villeval, 2015). We assess subjects' preferences over social allocation and their lying tendencies in the...

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...

Recent policy discussions have debated whether governments should treat state-owned and private enterprises equally or adopt different policies towards each type of enterprise. Such questions are pertinent for difficult economic climates in which government subsidy towards struggling state-owned...

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...

How can a government regulate an existing transportation monopoly based on features of the transport market and route structures? We analyze the government's regulatory problem from the perspective of two possible strategies: partially publicizing the existing monopolist, and entering the...

How do environmental conditions influence the purchase of critical illness insurance, and why? The mechanism for any potential relationship between them has substantial welfare and policy implications. Prior literature has found a positive relationship between supplementary health insurance and...

The effects of asymmetric information are often difficult to detect empirically, such as in insurance settings. We show that allowing for reference-dependent preferences can assist with this empirical challenge. Using detailed auto insurance claims data, we show that policyholders exhibit...