Is discounting of future instantaneous utilities consistent with altruism towards future selves? More precisely, can temporal preferences, expressed as a sum of discounted instantaneous utilities, be derived from a representation in the form of a sum of discounted total utilities? We find that a...

Our concern is with economizing behavior when preferences depend on experience. It is shown that such dependence, reflecting 'deep psychological structure', even when it is stable or habit forming in a fixed environment, can be destabilizing in a market context when prices are adjusting, even...

We investigate whether temporal preferences expressed as a sum of discounted consumption utilities can be derived from a welfare representation in the form of a sum of discounted total utilities. We find that a consumption-based representation in the usual exponential form corresponds to...

We derive a family of probabilistic choice models including the multinomial logit model, from a microeconomic model in which the decision maker has to make some effort in order to avoid mistakes when implementing any desired outcome. The disutility of this effort enters the decision maker's goal...

A necessary and sufficient condition for an input to be inferior is that, taking into account the input adjustment, an increase of its price raises the marginal productivity of all inputs. Contrary to a widespread opinion, it is not necessary that (some) inputs are "rivals" (i.e., that some...

We study the properties of a profit-maximizing monopolist's optimal price distribution when selling to a loss-averse consumer, where (following Koszegi and Rabin (2006)) we assume that the consumer's reference point is her recent rational expectations about the purchase. If it is close to...

We develop a novel framework to analyze the structural implications of the marriage market for household consumption patterns. We start by defining a revealed preference characterization of efficient household consumption when the marriage is stable. In particular, stability means that the...

Why do we love stories? That this is not an idle question is shown by the fact that we spend an enormous amount of time in our lives following stories: telling and listening to them; reading them; watching them on television or in films or on stage. Despite their recurrent similarity and even...

Der Faktor Zeit spielt in der ökonomischen Theorie eine wichtige Rolle - intertemporale Entscheidungen sind in allen Bereichen der Wirtschaftstheorie und -politik relevant. In der überwiegenden Zahl der Fälle stützt man sich dabei auf das sogenannte Discounted-utility-Modell (DU-Modell), in...