We have collected data on the one-year-ahead income expectations of members of American households in our Survey of Economic Expectations (SEE), a module of a national continuous telephone survey conducted at the University of Wisconsin. The income- expectations questions take this form: "What...

To predict choice behavior, the standard practice of economists has been to infer decision processes from data on observed choices. When decision makers act with partial information, economists typically assume that persons form probabilistic expectations for unknown quantities and maximize...

Research aiming to understand the impact of public and private pension plans on individual decision making has been hampered by a dearth of empirical evidence on benefit expectations. We review the occasional national surveys that have sought to measure pension-benefit expectations and describe...

Consider the choice of a profiling policy where decisions to search for evidence of crime may vary with observable covariates of the persons at risk of search. I pose a planning problem whose objective is to minimise the social cost of crime and search. The consequences of a search rule depend...

Econometric analyses of treatment response commonly use instrumental variable (IV) assumptions to identify treatment effects. Yet the credibility of IV assumptions is often a matter of considerable disagreement. There is therefore good reason to consider weaker but more credible assumptions. To...

I analyse social interactions that stem from the successive endeavours of new cohorts of heterogeneous decision makers to learn from the experiences of past cohorts. A dynamic process of information accumulation and decision making occurs as the members of each cohort observe the experiences of...

Economists studying collective decision problems often consider how a social planner would behave. The standard exercise presumes complete knowledge of the welfare achieved by each feasible policy. However, we often have only partial knowledge of policy impacts. This paper extends my program of...