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...

When individuals choose from whatever alternatives available to them the one that maximizes their utility then it is always desirable that the government provide them with as many alternatives as possible. Individuals, however, do not always choose what is best for them and their mistakes may be...

We axiomatize a new class of recursive dynamic models that capture subjective constraints on the amount of information a decision maker can obtain, pay attention to, or absorb, via a Markov Decision Process for Information Choice (MIC). An MIC is a subjective decision process that specifies what...

Different models of uncertainty aversion imply strikingly different economic behavior. The key to understanding these differences lies in the dichotomy between first-order and second-order ambiguity aversion which I define here. My definition and its characterization are independent of specific...

One major challenge when conducting contingent valuation studies in developing countries is the choice of the appropriate payment vehicle. Since regular cash-income does not exist for the majority of the population and market integration is low, households in rural areas have less experience...

We refine the understanding of individual preferences across social lotteries, whereby the payoffs of a pair of subjects are exposed to random shocks. We find that aggregate behavior is ex-post and ex-ante inequality averse, but also that there is a wide variety of individual preferences and...

Overwhelming evidence from the cognitive sciences shows that, in simple discrimination tasks (determining what is louder, longer, brighter, or even which number is larger) humans make more mistakes and decide more slowly when the stimuli are closer along the relevant scale. We investigate to...

Economic preferences - like time, risk and social preferences - have been shown to be very influential for real-life outcomes, such as educational achievements, labor market outcomes, or health status. We contribute to the recent literature that has examined how and when economic preferences are...

Extensive evidence suggests that participants in the direct student-proposing deferred-acceptance mechanism (DSPDA) play dominated strategies. In particular, students with low priority tend to misrepresent their preferences for popular schools. To explain the observed data, we introduce...