The economic concept of the second-best involves the idea that multiple simultaneous deviations from a hypothetical first-best optimum may be optimal once the first-best itself can no longer be achieved, since one distortion may partially compensate for another. Within an evolutionary framework,...

Almost all important decisions in people's lives entail risky and delayed consequences. Regardless of whether we make choices involving health, wealth, love or education, almost every choice involves costs and benefits that are uncertain and materialize over time. Because risk and delay often...

This paper contributes to the axiomatization of additive rules for ranking sets of objects under the psychological principle of categorization. Firstly we proceed with the case where the elements in the sets are categorized into at most three groups, namely good (with value 1), neutral (with...

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment...

If a decision maker, in a world of uncertainty à la Anscombe and Aumann (1963), can choose acts according to some objective probability distribution (by throwing dice for instance) from any given set of acts, then there is no set of acts that allows an experimenter to test more than the Axiom...

Optimism bias is inconsistent with the independence of decision weights and payoffs found in models of choice under risk, such as expected utility theory and prospect theory. Hence, to explain the evidence suggesting that agents are optimistically biased, we propose an alternative model of risky...

We test the implications of ambiguity aversion in a principal-agent problem with multiple agents. When output distributions are uncertain, models of ambiguity aversion suggest that tournaments may become more attractive than independent wage contracts, in contrast to the case where output...

The paper develops an axiomatic framework for rational decision making. The von Neumann-Morgenstern axioms give rise to a richer risk attitude than that captured in the standard discounted expected utility model. I derive three models that permit a more comprehensive risk evaluation. These...

We present a semiparametric method to estimate group-level dispersion, which is particularly effective in the presence of censored data. We apply this procedure to obtain measures of occupation-specific wage dispersion using top-coded administrative wage data from the German IAB Employment...

We use data on insurance deductible choices to estimate a structural model of risky choice that incorporates standard risk aversion (diminishing marginal utility for wealth) and probability distortions. We find that probability distortions - characterized by substantial overweighting of small...