Two rationality arguments are used to justify the link between conditional and unconditional preferences in decision theory: dynamic consistency and consequentialism. Dynamic consistency requires that ex ante contingent choices are respected by updated preferences. Consequentialism states that...

This paper is concerned with the role of committees in collective decision-makingprocesses in a world where agents must be motivated to collect information. Committees improvethe quality of decision-making by providing information and by coordinating the collection ofinformation. We address two...

Most studies have not distinguished delay from intervals, so that whether the declining impatience really holds has been an open question. We conducted an experiment that explicitly distinguishes them, and confirmed the declining impatience. This implies that people make dynamically inconsistent...

This paper uses the example of an exam to model multi-dimensional search under a deadline. When the dimension is two, an order-invariance property allows simple characterization of the optimal search policy. Behavior is shown to be highly sensitive to changes in the deadline, and a wide variety...

Similar to welfare economics where with(out) interpersonal comparisons one defines unique (set-valued) welfare (Pareto) optima, we present a framework for one-person decision making where with(out) a prior probability distribution individual optimality prescribes usually a unique (set of)...

This paper explored the determinants of survival in a life and death situation created by an external and unpredictable shock. We are interested to see whether pro-social behaviour matters in such extreme situations. We therefore focus on the sinking of the RMS Titanic as a quasi-natural...

The sinking of the Titanic in April 1912 took the lives of 68 percent of the people aboard. Who survived? It was women and children who had a higher probability of being saved, not men. Likewise, people traveling in first class had a better chance of survival than those in second and third...

Concern about potential free riding in the provision of public goods has a long history. More recently, experimental economists have turned their attention to the conditions under which free riding would be expected to occur. A model of free riding is provided here which demonstrates that...

The paper is concerned with the interaction between two agents: an expert, announcing his probability that a particular state of the world will occur, and a non-expert decision-maker, who takes action according to his posterior beliefs. The decision-maker considers the expert an experiment of...

Ausgangspunkt sind die bekannten empirischen Verstöße gegen Axiome der Bernoulli-Rationalität und die Diskussion um seine präskriptive Ausschließlichkeit. Der Beitrag teilt Nichterwartungsnutzenkalküle in Kategorien ein, die sich für eine Modellierung unterschiedlicher Arten von...