Because psychology systematically explores human judgment, behavior, and well-being, it can teach us important facts about how humans differ from traditional economic assumptions. In this essay I discuss a selection of psychological findings relevant to economics. Standard economics assumes that...

Within the expected-utility framework, the only explanation for risk aversion is that the utility function for wealth is concave: A person has lower marginal utility for additional wealth when she is wealthy than when she is poor. This paper provides a theorem showing that expected-utility...

Psychological evidence indicates that a person's well-being depends not only on his current consumption of goods, but on a reference level determined by his past consumption. According to Kahneman and Tversky's (1979) prospect theory, people care much more about losses relative to their...

JEL#: A12, A13, B49, C70, C91, D63<BR> Keywords: difference aversion, fairness, inequality aversion, maximin criterion, non-ultimatum games, reciprocal fairness, social preferences<BR> Departures from pure self interest in economic experiments have recently inspired models of "social preferences". We...