This is a doctoral dissertation. Personal financial planning is an interdisciplinary practice that draws many of its tools and techniques from the fields of finance, economics, law, taxation, and investment theory. The profession's body of knowledge is dominated by research devoted to these...

We develop a theoretical model to study the welfare effects of libertarian paternalism on information acquisition, social learning, and financial decision-making. Individuals in our model are permitted to appreciate and use the information content in the default options set by a social planner....

Diffusion of microgeneration technologies, particularly rooftop photovoltaic (PV), represents a key option in reducing emissions in the residential sector. We use a uniquely rich dataset from the burgeoning residential PV market in Texas to study the nature of the consumer's decision-making...

This Chapter discusses the emergence of online word of mouth, the process by which consumers disseminate their views about marketplace goods and services. Due to online word of mouth, consumers have an unprecedented ability to influence the brand perceptions of other consumers. Unfortunately,...

A choice behavior is rational if it is made in accordance with the maximization of some context-independent preference relation. This paper re-examines the classical questions of implementation theory under complete information in a setting in which players' choices need not be rational and in...

Non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are exerting growing pressure on firms to eliminate product components (such as palm oil) that are harmful to the environment (such as rainforests) or replace such components with NGO-certified sustainable components. Under which conditions does NGO pressure...

Since Markowitz (1959), we deal with the uncomfortable stylized fact called the diversification puzzle- most investors hold only few individual stocks in their portfolios, though the mean-variance portfolio selection model requires many stocks. This paper demonstrates that the ex post...

We conduct a proper test of the claim that people are overconfident, in the sense that they believe that they are better than others. The results of the experiment we present do not allow us to reject the hypotheses that the data has been generated by perfectly rational, unbiased, and...

Elicitation procedures (e.g., choice, valuation, matching, joint/separate evaluation) may generate reversed preferences between alternatives. Yet procedure-dependent preferences can be endogenous. When attribute importance is imperfectly known, people can engage in costly information...

This paper considers family formation and reciprocity-based cooperation in the form of sharing of earnings-risk. While risk sharing is one benefit to marriage it is also limited by divorce risk. With search in the marriage market there may be multiple equilibria differing not only in divorce...