The paper develops an axiomatic framework for rational decision making. The von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms give rise to a richer risk attitude than that captured in the standard discounted expected utility model. I derive three models that permit a more comprehensive risk evaluation. These...

Almost all important decisions in people’s lives entail risky and delayed consequences. Regardless of whether we make choices involving health, wealth, love or education, almost every choice involves costs and benefits that are uncertain and materialize over time. Because risk and delay often...

A large body of experimental research has demonstrated that, on average, people violate the axioms of expected utility theory as well as of discounted utility theory. In particular, aggregate behavior is best characterized by probability distortions and hyperbolic discounting. But is it the same...

This paper tests the broadly adopted assumption that people apply a single discount rate to the utility from different sources of consumption. Using unique data from two surveys conducted in rural Uganda including both hypothetical and real choices over different goods, the paper elicits time...

The paper develops an axiomatic framework for rational decision making. The von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms give rise to a richer risk attitude than that captured in the standard discounted expected utility model. I derive three models that permit a more comprehensive risk evaluation. These...

We propose an optimization criterion that yields extraordinary consumption smoothing compared to the well known results of the life-cycle model. Under this criterion we solve the related consumption and investment optimization problem faced by individuals with preferences for intertemporal...

Future events are uncertain by their very nature. Therefore, people's risk preferences are likely to play a role in the valuation of allegedly guaranteed future outcomes. We show that future uncertainty conjointly with people's proneness to nonlinear probability weighting generates a unifying...

A relationship between lying behavior and social preferences has often been proposed in explaining patterns of lying aversion (ex. Erat and Gneezy, 2012; Houser, Vetter and Winter, 2012; Maggian and Villeval, 2015). We assess subjects' preferences over social allocation and their lying tendencies in the...

The cornerstone of mainstream economic theory is the premise of rationality. Humans are assumed to be rational economic agents who, subject to the available information and limited resources, are able to select, among a set of alternatives, the best means to maximize their ends and their...

Diversification is a fundamental concept in economics, decision theory and finance. It also lies at the core of the Darwinian evolution argument, and diversifying behavior known as bet-hedging has been widely documented in other species. The central premise of this paper is that attitudes...