Research has shown that procrastination has signicant adverse effects on individuals, including lower savings and poorer health. Procrastination is typically modeled as resulting from present bias. In this paper we study an alternative: excessively optimistic beliefs about future demands on an...

Current time allocation and household production models face three major weaknesses: First, they only describe the average time allocation. Thus, information about the order of activities is lost. Therefore, it is impossible to describe the influence of activities on later ones. Such...

The majority of British home and motor insurance policies automatically renew annually, at a price chosen by the provider, unless consumers actively switch or negotiate. Auto-renewal can be beneficial to consumers for example by ensuring continuity of cover. However, the media, consumer groups...

The method of instrumental variables was first used in the 1920s to estimate supply and demand elasticities, and later used to correct for measurement error in single-equation models. Recently, instrumental variables have been widely used to reduce bias from omitted variables in estimates of...

In this paper, we extend the individual evolutionary learning model by incorporating other-regarding considerations and apply the model to some Cournot games. Using the model fitted to the experimental data of a repeated 3-player Cournot game (with nonlinear cost and demand functions), we...

Understanding discrimination is key for designing policy interventions that promote equality in society. Economists have studied the topic intensively, typically taxonomizing discrimination as either taste-based or (accurate) statistical discrimination. To enrich this taxonomy, we design a...

Households regularly fail to make optimal financial decisions. But what are the underlying reasons for this? Using two conceptually distinct measures of time inconsistency based on bank account transaction data and behavioral measurement experiments, we show that the excessive use of bank...

Understanding discrimination is key for designing policy interventions that promote equality in society. Economists have studied the topic intensively, typically taxonomizing discrimination as either taste-based or (accurate) statistical discrimination. To reveal the limitations of this taxonomy...

Households regularly fail to make optimal financial decisions. But what are the underlying reasons for this? Using two conceptually distinct measures of time inconsistency based on bank account transaction data and behavioral measurement experiments, we show that the excessive use of bank...

Governments and organizations often implement policies designed to help people in case of an undesirable event. Such policies can make the society better off, but they may also create moral hazard. We use a laboratory experiment to examine two questions. First, can discretionary decisions to...