Scitovsky is known as a forerunner of behavioural economics simply because he drew heavily on psychology and claimed that people's choices may be "joyless" (Scitovsky, The joyless economy, 1976). However, a careful reformulation of his analysis shows that he anticipated a number of insights...

The paper suggests that casting the choice problem in terms of alternative time-consuming activities can foster the fruitful cross-fertilization between economics and psychology along the lines suggested by Scitovsky in the Joyless Economy. The first part emphasizes how mainstream, utility-based...

Psychologists report that people make choices on the basis of "decision utilities'' that routinely overestimate the "experienced utility'' consequences of these choices. This paper argues that this dichotomy between decision and experienced utilities may be the solution to an evolutionary design...

Interaction, the act of mutual influence, is an essential part of daily life and economic decisions. This paper presents an individual decision procedure for interacting individuals. According to our model, individuals seek influence from each other for those issues that they cannot solve on...

We report on two novel choice experiments with real goods where subjects in one treatment are forced to choose, as is the norm in economic experiments, while in the other they are not but can instead incur a small cost to defer choice. Using a variety of measures, we find that the active choices...

Climate change and other sustainability problems represent unprecedented challenges to humanity today. Because of such challenges there is a need for fundamental social changes of current unsustainable society. There is essential advanced interdisciplinary scientific contribution for informing...