We study the role of heuristic versus deliberative processing in intertemporal choice. Using studies in the Democratic Republic of Congo and an online labor market, we show that waiting periods –designed to prompt deliberation by temporally separating news about choice sets from choices...

This study provides insights on the role of early childhood family environment within the process of preference formation. We start by presenting evidence showing that breastfeeding duration is a valid measure of the quality of early childhood environment. In the main analysis, we then...

Survey data show that subjects positively discount both gains and losses but discount gains more heavily than losses. This holds for monetary and non-monetary outcomes.

We study intertemporal choices through an experiment that elicits a subject's plan and then tracks its implementation over time. There are two main results. When facing a costly task to be completed under a deadline, two thirds of subjects prefer anticipating it rather than postponing it. Choice...

A large body of evidence suggests that people are willing to sacrifice personal material gain in order to adhere to a moral motive such as fairness or truth-telling. Yet less is known about what happens when moral motives are in conflict. We hypothesize that in such situations, individuals...

Services are often provided by groups. The question of remuneration arises both at the group level and for each individual group member. We examine the question of how relative pay should be designed within the group if all group members are to regard the payment scheme as fair. We use a...

In a variety of individual decision contexts, people have been shown to exhibit presentbiased time preferences. Little is known, however, about discounting when there are trade-offs between own and others' consumption. In this paper, we provide a systematic analysis of present bias in individual...

Many important intertemporal decisions, such as investments of firms or households, are made by groups rather than individuals. Little is known what happens to such collective decisions when group members have different incentives for waiting, because the economics literature on group decision...

We investigate the presence and stability of dynamically inconsistent time preferences across contexts with and without interpersonal trade-offs. In a longitudinal experiment subjects make a series of intertemporal allocation decisions of real-effort tasks between themselves and another person....

Mithilfe von Experimenten lassen sich Entscheidungen und kognitive Verzerrungen in einem kontrollierten Umfeld untersuchen. Erkenntnisse aus Experimenten können Aufschluss darüber geben, wie Nudges effektiv und effizient angewendet werden können und wo von deren Nutzung abgesehen werden...