We experimentally investigate the mechanisms with which strategic distortion of individual beliefs about dominant norms of honesty arise. Embedded in the context of lying, we systematically vary both the nature of elicited beliefs (descriptive about what others do, or normative about what others...

Recent estimates are that about 150 million children under five years of age are stunted, with significant long-run negative consequences on their schooling, cognitive skills, health and economic productivity. Understanding what determines such growth retardation, therefore, is very important....

An important question in economics is how people choose between different payments in the future. The classical normative model predicts that a decision maker discounts a later payment relative to an earlier one by an exponential function of the time between them. Descriptive models use...

We investigate two alternative explanations why men may hold more stocks than women. Apart from a gender difference in risk aversion, gender differences in either optimism or in perceived risk of financial markets might cause men to hold more risky assets. Our results show that men tend to be...

Behavioral economics lacks empirical evidence on some foundational questions. We adapt standard elicitation methods to measure multiple behavioral factors per person in a representative U.S. sample, along with financial condition, cognitive skills, financial literacy, classical preferences, and...

This paper aims to inform banks, consumers, researchers, consumer protection organizations and other stakeholders for the importance of these regulations as well as raising some other related issues to be addressed for the protection of mortgage loan consumers. In 2014, EU political reasoning...

We review the theory of information cascades and social learning. Our goal is to describe in a relatively integrated and accessible way the more important themes, insights and applications of the literature as it has developed over the last thirty years. We also highlight open questions and...

The present paper examines attribute substitution in terms of both heuristics and attribution theory in social psychology. Alternative “old” approaches in psychology were special because they considered choice in terms that were similar to attributional inference in social psychology and...

We study optimal growth under learning. We extend the Mirman-Zilcha stochastic growth results characterizing optimal programs for general utility and production functions to the case of learning. We then use recursive methods to study the effect of learning on the dynamic program by considering...