We study collective decisions by time-discounting individuals choosing a common consumption stream. We show that with any heterogeneity in time preferences, utilitarian aggregation necessitates a present bias. In lab experiments three quarters of `social planners' exhibited present biases, and...

We study a vote buying setup where a committee votes on a proposal important to the vote buyer. We characterize the cheapest combination of bribes that guarantees the proposal's passing in different voting environments. We find that for both simultaneous and sequential votes, the vote buyer...

This article contrasts the secular and Catholic literature on consumerism and its implications for liberty. Three specific questions are considered: Is consumerism harmful to liberty? Is it a necessary consequence of a market economy? Who is responsible for consumerism? The article shows that...

This paper develops and offers the theory of embodied social presence (ESP). The paper reviews the literature on place and space, presence, and embodiment and demonstrates that the role of the body as a focal point for action during social interaction in multi-user virtual environments has been...

This chapter examines how the original tenets of the affect-as-information hypothesis can be extended to explain a wide range of judgment phenomena, especially with respect to consumer decision making. To this end, research within social psychology as well as research from other fields such as...

We study the consumption behaviour of an asymmetric network of heterogeneous agents in the framework of discrete choice models with stochastic decision rules. We assume that the interactions among agents are uniquely specified by their "social distance" and consumption is driven by peering,...

Online labor markets provide new opportunities for behavioral research, but conducting economic experiments online raises important methodological challenges. This particularly holds for interactive designs. In this paper, we provide a methodological discussion of the similarities and...

Multidimensional welfare analysis has recently been revived by money-metric measures based on explicit fairness principles and the respect of individual preferences. To operationalize this approach, preference heterogeneity can be inferred from the observation of individual choices (revealed...