Recently equity carve-outs in US technology stocks appear to violate a basic premise of financial theory: identical assets have identical prices. In our 1998-2000 sample, holders of a share of company A are expected to receive x shares of company B, but the price of A is less than x times the...

A question of increasing interest to researchers in a variety of fields is whether the biases found in judgment and decision making research remain present in contexts in which experienced participants face strong economic incentives. To investigate this question, we analyze the decision making...

Although many economists, most notably Strotz, have discussed dynamic inconsistency and precommitment, none have dealt directly with the essence of the problem: self-control. This paper attempts to fill that gap by modeling man as an organization. The Strotz model is recast to include the...

We examine high stakes three-person bargaining in a game show where contestants bargain over a large money amount that is split into three unequal shares. We find that individual behavior and outcomes are strongly influenced by equity concerns: those who contributed more to the jackpot claim...

We present a pre-registered experiment testing the effects of three, high-payoff (up to $50,000) vaccine regret lotteries in Philadelphia. In each drawing, residents of a randomly selected “treatment” zip code received half of the 12 lottery prizes (boosting their chances to 59-98x those of...

This paper examines the proposition that fluctuations in discounts on closed end funds are driven by changes in individual investor sentiment toward closed end funds and other securities. The theory implies that discounts on various funds must move together, that new funds get started when...

Decision makers do not make choices in a vacuum. They make them in an environment where many features, noticed and unnoticed, can influence their decisions. The person who creates that environment is, in our terminology, a choice architect. In this paper we analyze some of the tools that are...

This paper is a theoretical analysis of individual and societal demands for life saving. We begin by demonstrating that the allocation of health expenditures to maximize lives saved may be inconsistent with the willingness-to-pay criterion and consumer sovereignty. We further investigate the...

Economic analysis of law usually proceeds under the assumptions of neoclassical economics. But empirical evidence gives much reason to doubt these assumptions; people exhibit bounded rationality, bounded self-interest, and bounded willpower. This article offers a broad vision of how law and...

Recent equity carve-outs in U.S. technology stocks appear to violate a basic premise of financial theory: identical assets have identical prices. In our 1998-2000 sample, holders of a share of company A are expected to receive x shares of company B, but the price of A is less than x times the...