Some food items that are commonly considered unhealthy also tend to elicit impulsive responses. The pain of paying in cash can curb impulsive urges to purchase such unhealthy food products. Credit card payments, in contrast, are relatively painless and weaken impulse control. Consequently,...

The cornerstone of mainstream economic theory is the premise of rationality. Humans are assumed to be rational economic agents who, subject to the available information and limited resources, are able to select, among a set of alternatives, the best means to maximize their ends and their...

Two well-known violations of Expected Utility Theory (EUT) are the Allais Paradox and the preference reversal between gamble choices and gamble bids. The Allais Paradox undermines the independence axiom, according to which the preferences for two gambles should be unaffected by an independent...

Escalation is a key characteristic of many consumption behaviors that has not received the theoretical attention it deserves. The aim of this paper is to propose both a definition and a theoretical treatment of escalation in consumption. We shall define escalation as the attempt to obtain...

We propose and develop a dynamic theory of endogenous preference formation in which people adopt worldviews that shape their judgments about their experiences. The framework highlights the role of mindset flexibility, a trait that determines the relative weights the decision maker places on her...

Using longitudinal data from PSID, we show the positive relation between labor income and the equity share of financial wealth is stronger for those who have a higher persistence in shocks to permanent labor income. The results support the hypothesis that the cross sectional variation in...

The paper considers the problems of interpreting subjects’ responses to laboratory intertemporal choice and matching tasks that arise from (i) the existence of capital markets outside the laboratory; (ii) the distinction between observable income and unobservable consumption. It distinguishes...

Economic policy-making has long been more integrated than social policy-making in part because the statistics and much of the analysis that supports economic policy are based on a common conceptual framework – the system of national accounts. People interested in economic analysis and economic...

What information would people like to have? What information would they prefer to avoid? How does the provision of information bear on welfare? And what does this mean for food policy? Representative surveys in eleven nations find that substantial percentages of people do not want to receive...

This essay reviews the family of models that seek to provide aggregate risk based explanations for the empirically observed equity premium. Theories based on non-expected utility preference structures, limited financial market participation, model uncertainty and the small probability of...