Some economists believe that social norms are created to improve welfare where the market fails. I show that tipping is such a norm, using a model in which a waiter chooses service quality and then a customer chooses the tip. The customer’s utility depends on the social norm about tipping and...

We compare the revenues of a house-to-house collection for a charity before and after the introduction of the euro in a ceteris paribus setting. We find strong evidence of money illusion, supplementing earlier econometric, experimental, and survey evidence on its existence.

Three broad types of explanations can be found relative to breast cancer screening attendance: socioeconomic characteristics (education), preferences (e.g. attitude toward risk) and perceptions. These determinants are elicited in the experimental laboratory on 178 women aged between 50 and 75...

We study whether cognitive ability explains choices in a wide variety of behavioral tasks, including riskand social preferences, by collecting evidence from almost 1,200 subjects across eight experimentalprojects. Since Frederick (2005)'s Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT) has been administered to...

Other-regarding preferences have been documented in many strategic settings. We provide a model in which the managers of firms in an oligopoly have preferences for both consumer welfare and own income. We find that profit sharing can function as a facilitating practice. Managers must receive a...

The main purpose of rational choice theory is to lay out in clear and transparent terms what conditions are necessary and/or sufficient for the validity of statements about consistent human behavior. Strong criteria for rationality are ‘wrong’ if understood as a positive...

We contend that consumption of a given status conveying good frequently follows a Kuznet-like curve. Concretely, the consumption of a given status marker first increases with the level of income per capita, reaches a maximum and then decreases at higher levels of income. Moreover, globalization...

Traditional insurance economics derives some definite conclusions using the neoclassical economics method. However, those conclusions are too abstract to explain phenomena in the real insurance market. In other words, a number of anomalies remain that are not explained by traditional insurance...

A key open question in economics is the practical, portable modeling of bounded rationality. In this short note, I report on ongoing progress that is more fully developed elsewhere. I present some results from a new model with boundedly rational features in which the decision-maker (DM) builds a...

This article shows that the possibility of formally incorporating reference-dependence into the theory of consumer behavior was explored well before Kahneman and Tversky in the early 1990s; specifically, in separate papers by Alt, Samuelson, and Bernardelli in the late 1930s. These papers...