An important advance in the study of reference-dependent preferences is the discipline provided by coherent accounts of reference point formation. Kőszegi and Rabin (2006) provide such discipline by positing a reference point grounded in rational expectations. We examine the predictions of...

We use a unique feature of California's property tax system to empirically identify the effect of selling homeowners' past property tax payments on their choice of listing price. Although past property taxes are sunk costs, we find that they have a significant positive effect on the sellers'...

This paper studies the role of goal bracketing to attenuate time inconsistency. When setting non-binding goals for a multi-stage project, an agent must also decide how and when to evaluate himself against such goals. In particular, he can bracket broadly by setting an aggregate goal for the...

We study in an online, real-effort experiment how the bracketing of non-binding goals affects performance in a work-leisure self-control problem. We externally induce the goal bracket - daily goals or a weekly goal - and within that bracket let subjects set goals for how much they want to work...

Carbon taxes are a prominent policy instrument for decreasing the consumption of CO2-intensive goods in order to reduce the negative external effects involved in the production or consumption of such goods. A tax leads to higher consumer prices, which typically lowers consumption. However, in...

Despite average per-capita consumption of roughly $1 per day, many Tanzanian households do not take advantage of bulk discounts for staple goods. Using transaction diaries covering nearly 57,000 purchases by 1,499 households over two weeks, we find that through bulk purchasing the average...

We propose a single evolutionary explanation for the origin of several behaviors that have been observed in organisms ranging from ants to human subjects, including risk-sensitive foraging, risk aversion, loss aversion, probability matching, randomization, and diversification. Given an initial...

Expected utility theory (EUT) is a parsimonious theory that explains behavior under risk and uncertainty. Previous research showed that EUT of wealth is not a satisfactory explanation of risk aversion. We use empirical data from a controlled laboratory experiment to show that EUT of income...

We estimate 11 well-studied behavioral phenomena in a group of 190 laboratory subjects (short-term discount rates, small stakes risk aversion, present bias, loss aversion, the endowment effect, aversion to ambiguity and compound lotteries, the common ratio and common consequence effects and...

In his book from the early 1800s, Essai Philosophique sur les Probabilités, the mathematician Pierre-Simon de Laplace anticipated many ideas developed in the 1970s in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics, explaining human tendencies to deviate from norms of rationality in the presence...