We study antisocial preferences in simple money-burning tasks. A decision maker can choose whether or not to reduce another person’s payoff at an own cost. We vary across tasks the initial endowment of the decider and the victim. We find that most conventional expectations are refuted:...

Prospect theory scholars have identified important human decision-making biases, but they have been conspicuously silent on the question of the origin of these biases. Here we create a model that shows preferences consistent with prospect theory may have an origin in evolutionary psychology....

This paper provides empirical evidence that probability judgments help explain a reference-dependent preference by drivers in Tokyo. These probability judgments relate to reference points and drivers’ personalities and intuition, which influence the decision making, and can explain several...

Evidence suggests that there are substantial and systematic differences in cooperation rates under varying framing conditions in social dilemmas. Several explanations of these differences have been presented. Some (e.g. McCusker and Carnevale, 1995; van Dijk and Wilke, 2000) argue that social frames...

We build on Köszegi and Rabin (2009) and propose a model in which the reference point consists of two periods lagged beliefs about consumption outcomes. As opposed to the original model in which the reference point instantaneously adjusts to new information, our formulation renders the...

This project examines the role of heterogeneity in loss aversion for identifying models of expectations-based reference dependence (Kőszegi and Rabin, 2006, 2007) (KR). Different levels of loss aversion lead to different signs for comparative statics previously used to test the KR model. In an...

This paper empirically tests the expectations-based reference-dependent preference theory, by using a unique panel data-set on the non-negotiable daily list prices for used cars advertised by a large national dealership. It identifies a major point in car buyers' price expectation for a used car...

Are individuals always better off when their preferences can be represented by expected utility?I study this question in a bargaining game where individuals bargain over a pie of fixed size, and I contrast the share received in the long-run by expected utility maximisers with the share they...