Recent estimates are that about 150 million children under five years of age are stunted, with significant long-run negative consequences on their schooling, cognitive skills, health and economic productivity. Understanding what determines such growth retardation, therefore, is very important....

Maximising expected value is the classic doctrine in choice theory under empirical uncertainty, and a prominent proposal in the emerging literature on normative uncertainty, i.e., uncertainty about the standard of evaluation. But how should Expectationalism be stated in general, when we can face...

An important question in economics is how people choose between different payments in the future. The classical normative model predicts that a decision maker discounts a later payment relative to an earlier one by an exponential function of the time between them. Descriptive models use...

We investigate two alternative explanations why men may hold more stocks than women. Apart from a gender difference in risk aversion, gender differences in either optimism or in perceived risk of financial markets might cause men to hold more risky assets. Our results show that men tend to be...

Behavioral economics lacks empirical evidence on some foundational questions. We adapt standard elicitation methods to measure multiple behavioral factors per person in a representative U.S. sample, along with financial condition, cognitive skills, financial literacy, classical preferences, and...

This paper aims to inform banks, consumers, researchers, consumer protection organizations and other stakeholders for the importance of these regulations as well as raising some other related issues to be addressed for the protection of mortgage loan consumers. In 2014, EU political reasoning...

When economic agents decide their optimal environmental behavior, they have to take into account non continuos evolutionary trends and irreversible changes characterising environmental phenomena. Given the still non perfect biophysical and economic knowledge, decisions have to be taken in an...

We review the theory of information cascades and social learning. Our goal is to describe in a relatively integrated and accessible way the more important themes, insights and applications of the literature as it has developed over the last thirty years. We also highlight open questions and...

This paper proposes and applies a formal theoretical model of an automatic (prosocial and antisocial) caring mechanism: the informational affective tie mechanism (iATM) model. Novel in the formalization is the factoring in of information extraction concerning the behavioral type of agents...

The present paper examines attribute substitution in terms of both heuristics and attribution theory in social psychology. Alternative “old” approaches in psychology were special because they considered choice in terms that were similar to attributional inference in social psychology and...