This paper examines the determinants of tax evasion under prospect theory. For prospect theory, reference dependence is a fundamental element (the utility function depends on gains and losses relative to a reference point and not on final wealths as in expected utility theory). In order to...

Within the prospect theory the paper examines production and hedging decisions of a competitive firm under price uncertainty. We consider the prospect theory for the firm's utility function in the two moment model known as (mu,sigma)-preference. In contrast to the literature our findings show...

The standard expected utility model of tax evasion predicts that evasion is decreasing in the marginal tax rate (the Yitzhaki puzzle). The existing literature disagrees on whether prospect theory overturns the puzzle. We disentangle four distinct elements of prospect theory and find loss...

Risk attitudes are known to be sensitive to large stake variations. However, little is known on the sensitivity to moderate variations in stakes. This is important for studies that want to compare risk attitudes between countries or over time. I find that variations of ±20% affect only utility,...

We add some elements of prospect theory to an analytically tractable version of Lucas's “islands” model and show that the inclusion of reference dependence, declining sensitivity and loss aversion into the agents’ utility function leads to four main results. First, the presence of...

Many health risks are ambiguous in the sense that reliable and credible information about these risks is unavailable. In health economics, ambiguity is usually handled through sensitivity analysis, which implicitly assumes that people are neutral towards ambiguity. However, empirical evidence...

This paper presents a simple Overlapping Generation Model (OLG), aug-mented with Prospect Theory elements in the spirit of al-Nowaihi and Dhami (2007). Themodel tackle several open questions in the analysis of tax evasion and compliance decisions. In particular, the paper presents a new and...

We let subjects take risky decisions that affect themselves and a passive recipient. Adding a requirement to justify their choices significantly reduces loss aversion. This indicates that such an accountability mechanism may be effective at debiasing loss aversion in agency relations.

This paper considers the problem of a risk-neutral firm offering a gamble to consumers with preferences given by prospect theory. Under conditions satisfied by virtually all functional forms used in the literature, firms can extract arbitrarily high expected values from consumers. Moreover, for...

Natural disasters may increase in frequency and severity in the future as a result of climate change, which is likely to have an impact on the demand for natural disaster insurance. Insights about individual risk beliefs and behavioural responses to changing risks are relevant for insurers, as...