Related papers: Temptation: Immediacy and certainty
We consider a model where an agent has a repeated decision to make and wishes to maximize their total payoff. Payoffs are influenced by an action taken by the agent, but also an unknown state of the world that evolves over time. Before…
How do incentive levels affect strategic behaviour? We address this with an experiment that separately identifies own- and opponent-incentive effects in two dominance-solvable games that differ in strategic complexity. Higher own incentives…
We model the joint distribution of choice probabilities and decision times in binary choice tasks as the solution to a problem of optimal sequential sampling, where the agent is uncertain of the utility of each action and pays a constant…
We characterize decreasing impatience, a common behavioral phenomenon in intertemporal choice. Discount factors that display decreasing impatience are characterized through a convexit y axiom for investments at fixed interest rates. Then we…
We study the identification of dynamic discrete choice models with sophisticated, quasi-hyperbolic time preferences under exclusion restrictions. We consider both standard finite horizon problems and empirically useful infinite horizon…
We consider active learning under incentive compatibility constraints. The main application of our results is to economic experiments, in which a learner seeks to infer the parameters of a subject's preferences: for example their attitudes…
Empirical economists are often deterred from the application of fixed effects binary choice models mainly for two reasons: the incidental parameter problem and the computational challenge even in moderately large panels. Using the example…
Intertemporal choices involve making decisions that require weighing the costs in the present against the benefits in the future. One specific type of intertemporal choice is the decision between purchasing an individual item or opting for…
Understanding how individuals make decisions involving risk is a fundamental aspect of behavioral research. Despite the ubiquity of risk in various aspects of life, limited empirical work has explored student risk-taking behavior in…
Making an informed decision -- for example, when choosing a career or housing -- requires knowledge about the available options. Such knowledge is generally acquired through costly trial and error, but this learning process can be disrupted…
In economics and psychology, delay discounting is often used to characterize how individuals choose between a smaller immediate reward and a larger delayed reward. People with higher delay discounting rate (DDR) often choose smaller but…
This paper empirically analyzes how individual characteristics are associated with risk aversion, loss aversion, time discounting, and present bias. To this end, we conduct a large-scale demographically representative survey across eight…
Contemporary scientific research is a distributed, collaborative endeavor, carried out by teams of researchers, regulatory institutions, funding agencies, commercial partners, and scientific bodies, all interacting with each other and…
Preferences often change -- even in short time intervals -- due to either the mere passage of time (present-biased preferences) or changes in environmental conditions (state-dependent preferences). On the basis of the empirical findings in…
Inertia and context-dependent choice effects are well-studied classes of behavioural phenomena. While much is known about these effects in isolation, little is known about whether one of them "dominates" the other when both can potentially…
Large amounts of evidence suggest that trust levels in a country are an important determinant of its macroeconomic growth. In this paper, we investigate one channel through which trust might support economic performance: through the levels…
We prove that a subtle but substantial bias exists in a common measure of the conditional dependence of present outcomes on streaks of past outcomes in sequential data. The magnitude of this streak selection bias generally decreases as the…
Recent work has considered theoretical models for the behavior of agents with specific behavioral biases: rather than making decisions that optimize a given payoff function, the agent behaves inefficiently because its decisions suffer from…
As a firm varies the price of a product, consumers exhibit reference effects, making purchase decisions based not only on the prevailing price but also the product's price history. We consider the problem of learning such behavioral…
The role of specific cognitive processes in deviations from constant discounting in intertemporal choice is not well understood. We evaluated decreased impatience in intertemporal choice tasks independent of discounting rate and…