This paper considers electoral behavior and institutional capture when voters choose between a populist and non-populist politician. Populist politicians provide voters with a utility boom followed by a subsequent bust, as in Dornbusch and Edwards (The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin...

This paper considers electoral behavior and institutional capture when voters choose between a populist and non-populist politician. Populist politicians provide voters with a utility boom followed by a subsequent bust, as in Dornbusch and Edwards (The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin...

This study examines firm behaviour when consumers can costlessly select a default product, or incur a decision cost to find their personal optimum. Monopolists can be efficient in some contexts, because they have an incentive to reduce decision costs in order to increase available surplus. They...

This paper considers an intrapersonal game between a moderate cold self and a hot self with a higher marginal utility of consumption. Indulging in a tempting good -- eating the first chocolate from a bowl, for example -- induces the hot self and makes further consumption more likely. In...

Over time, our actions shape our habits and even our characters. I introduce this psychological trait into a model of economic decisionmaking: how agents allocate resources across time determines how tempting they find present consumption over future consumption. Minor differences between agents...

The complexity of the modern world imposes significant cognitive and material costs on consumers. This paper models decision costs to better describe and understand the effects of behavioural policy, and finds that, similar to traditional economic policy, behavioural policies can create welfare...

This paper considers electoral behavior and institutional capture when voters choose between a populist and non-populist politician. Populist politicians provide voters with a utility boom followed by a subsequent bust, as in Dornbusch and Edwards (The Macroeconomics of Populism in Latin...