In many low- and middle-income countries, health coverage has improved dramatically in the past two decades, but health outcomes have not. As such, effective coverage-a measure of service delivery that meets a minimum standard of quality-remains unacceptably low. Improving Effective Coverage in...

We use four incentivized representative surveys to study the endowment effect for lotteries in 4,000 U.S. adults. We replicate the standard finding of an endowment effect–the divergence between Willingness to Accept (WTA) and Willingness to Pay (WTP), but document three new findings. First, we...

Two of the most well known regularities observed in preferences under risk and uncertainty are ambiguity aversion and the Allais paradox. We study the behavior of an agent who can display both tendencies simultaneously. We introduce a novel notion of preference for hedging that applies to both...

Willingness to pay (WTP) and willingness to accept (WTA) a monetary amount for a lottery should be closely related. In data from an incentivized survey of a representative sample of 3,000 U.S. adults, we find that WTA and WTP for a lottery are, at best, weakly correlated. Across all respondents,...

People may be uncertain about future preferences, leading to both a preference for flexibility in choice between menus and stochastic choice from menus. This paper describes an experimental test of preference uncertainty in a realeffort task. We observe subjects' preferences over menus of work...

We introduce and axiomatically characterize a model of status quo bias in which the status quo affects choices by both changing preferences and focusing attention. The resulting Limited Attention Status Quo Bias model can explain both the finding that status quo bias is more prevalent in larger...

Satisficing is a hugely influential model of boundedly rational choice, yet it cannot be easily tested using standard choice data. We develop necessary and sufficient conditions for stochastic choice data to be consistent with satisficing, assuming that preferences are fixed, but search order...

With complete information, choice of one option over another conveys preference. Yet when search is incomplete, this is not necessarily the case. It may instead reflect unawareness that a superior alternative was available. To separate these phenomena, we consider non-standard data on the...

We introduce and axiomatically characterize a model of status quo bias in which the status quo affects choices by both changing preferences and focusing attention. The resulting Limited Attention Status Quo Bias model can explain both the finding that status quo bias is more prevalent in larger...