This paper reviews and synthesizes the theory of information economics and empirical evidence on how information changes the behavior of consumers, households and firms. I show that consumers respond to new information in food experiments but perhaps not in retirement account management. Some...

This paper reviews the problems and potential benefits of integrating personality psychology into economics. Economists have much to learn from and contribute to personality psychology.

Honorable Mention, Outstanding Choices Article Award, 2011

Is it better to apply effort to increase personal consumption, or control what one wants? The model presented here provides a characterization of demand for self control, namely, its responsiveness to price and risk. Unlike most other models of self control, the model does not identify self...

Experimental choice data from 881 subjects based on 40 time-tradeoff items and 32 risky choice items reveal that most subjects are time-inconsistent and most violate the axioms of expected utility theory. These inconsistencies cannot be explained by well-known theories of behavioral...

We assess the predictive power of a model of other-regarding preferences - inequality aversion - using a within-subjects design. We run four different experiments (ultimatum game, dictator game, sequential-move prisoners' dilemma and public-good game) with the same sample of subjects. We elicit...

Behavioral economics has in recent decades emerged as a prominent set of methodological developments that have attracted considerable attention both within and outside the economics profession. The time is therefore auspicious to assess behavioral contributions to particular subfields of...

Behavioral/experimental economics is poised to enter a new phase in its relatively brief intellectual history, moving beyond empirical tests of standard behavioral assumptions in the social sciences to the problem of designing improved institutions that are tuned to fit real-world behavior. For...

Merrifield (2009) provides a useful polemic about the sad state of data analysis too frequently encountered in the school choice literature. The available data come mostly from limited policy experiments with only modest amounts of choice and competition. These data are then misapplied in...