The memo consists of six papers on a common theme: applying economic analysis to subjects at the time, 1972, considered non-economic. The first paper considers changes in preferences. The second considers strategies of a regime and its opposition. The Third discusses collective decision making...

Die Präzision ökonomischer Prognosen und die Qualität politischer Handlungsempfehlungen hängen in entscheidendem Ausmaß von der Qualität des zugrunde liegenden Verhaltensmodells ab. Nur ein empirisch gut fundiertes Modell ökonomischen Handelns erlaubt es, die Konsequenzen politischer...

Economic experiments conducted in laboratories employing an induced-values methodology can report on allocative efficiencies observed. This methodology is limited by requiring the experimenter to know subjects' motivations, an impossibility in field experiments. Allocative efficiency implies a...

People's desire for fair transactions can play an important role in negotiations, organizations, and markets. In this paper, we show that markets can also shape what people consider to be a fair transaction. We propose a simple and generally-applicable model of path-dependent fairness...

There is a large amount of cross-sectional evidence for a midlife low in the life cycle of human happiness and well-being (a 'U shape'). Yet no genuinely longitudinal inquiry has uncovered evidence for a U-shaped pattern. Thus some researchers believe the U is a statistical artefact. We...

We fuse a social dilemma game and a game pitting the group against nature, where the group's probability of avoiding disaster depends on the resources it raises from members. The result is the Nederlander-Prisoner's Dilemma Game where the cost of failure is equally shared. We introduce the...

Motivated by individuals' emotional response to risk at different time horizons, we model an 'anxious' agent - one who is more risk averse with respect to imminent risks than distant risks. Such preferences describe well-documented features of 1) individual behavior, 2) equilibrium prices, and...

We provide an evolutionary foundation to evidence that in some situations humans maintain optimistic or pessimistic attitudes towards uncertainty and are ignorant to relevant aspects of the environment. Players in strategic games face Knightian uncertainty about opponents' actions and maximize...

Several empirical findings have challenged the traditional trade-off between risk and incentives. By combining risk aversion and limited liability in a standard principal-agent model the empirical puzzle on the positive relationship between risk and incentives can be explained.

We run a public good experiment in the field and in the lab with (partly) the same subjects. The field experiment is a true natural field experiment as subjects do not know that they are exposed to an experimental variation. We can show that subjects' behavior in the classic lab public good...