Accompanying slide presentation available at http://ssrn.com/abstract=4019705Pigouvian taxes are often used to limit environmental externalities such as pollution. We argue that consumer contracts generate externalities by overwhelming consumers’ attention. Depleting each consumer’s...

In their 2008 book Nudge: Improving Decisions About Health, Wealth, and Happiness, Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein use research from psychology and behavioral economics to argue that people suffer from systematic cognitive biases. They propose that policymakers mitigate these biases by framing...

We study the regulation of a morally responsible agent in the context of a negative consumption externality and motivation crowding. In particular, we analyze how various governmental interventions affect the agent's motivation to assume moral responsibility. Employing a motivation-crowding...

Interdependencies in consumer behavior stem from either status-seeking consumption orcompliance with social norms. This paper analyzes how a consumption act changes froma means to signal the consumer’s status to a means of norm compliance. It is shown thatsuch a transformation can only be...

This paper investigates on price competition in the Hotelling location model with linear transportation costs when consumer preferences are affected by the number of consumers shopping at the same store. A consumption externality permits to consider the imitation and the congestion effects which...

This paper addresses the question whether taxes on unhealthy food are suitable for internalizing intergenerational externalities inflicted by parents when they decide on their children's diet. Within an OLG model with an imperfectly altruistic parent, the optimal steady state tax rate on...

Habits are an important cause of sluggish consumption adjustment in response to price shocks. This paper studies shifts within the consumption bundle under endogenous habit formation. I put forward a model with good-specific, or 'deep', habits that cause persistence in good-specific consumption....

This paper presents a two-sector dynamic general equilibrium model in a small open economy and considers the role of endogenous impatience and consumption externalities in a neoclassical growth model. In the case of socially increasing marginal impatience, there exists a unique and saddle-point...

We study the regulation of a morally responsible agent in the context of a negative consumption externality and motivation crowding. In particular, we analyze how various governmental interventions affect the agent’s motivation to assume moral responsibility. Employing a motivation-crowding...

This paper addresses the question whether taxes on unhealthy food are suitable for internalizing intergenerational externalities inflicted by parents when they decide on their children's diet. Within an OLG model with an imperfectly altruistic parent, the optimal steady state tax rate on...