It is widely accepted in social psychology that the need to maintain and enhance self-esteem is a fundamental human motive. We incorporate this factor into an otherwise ordinary principal-agent framework and examine its impact on the optimal incentive scheme and the agent's behavior, especially...

This paper considers the decision problem of a firm that is uncertain about the demand, and hence profitability, of a new product. We develop a model of a decision maker who sequentially learns about the true product profitability from observed product sales. Based on the current information,...

This paper examines the stability of deterministic steady-states in a class of economies where the state -variable is one dimensional and where agents use Bayesian techniques to form expectations. Thr dynamics with learning are locally convergent if the prior mean is close to a stable perfect...

This paper considers the intertemporal consumption/savings decision when income follows a random walk with drift and the drift coefficient is unknown. Instead agents are Bayesian learners, combining prior and sample information to form a posterior for the drift coefficient and future income....

This paper considers the intertemporal consumption/savings decision when income follows a random walk with drift and the drift coefficient is unknown. Instead agents are Bayesian learners, combining prior and sample information to form a posterior for the drift coefficient and future income....

This paper considers the intertemporal consumption/savings decision when income follows a random walk with drift and the drift coefficient is unknown. Instead agents are Bayesian learners, combining prior and sample information to form a posterior for the drift coefficient and future income....

This paper examines a mechanism of liquidity-preference fluctuations caused by people's learning behavior. % about the frequency of a liquidity shock. When observing a financial shock, they rationally update their belief so that the subjective probability of encountering it again is higher,...

This comment considers the applicability of the Cyert and DeGroot model of adaptive utility in modeling consumer choice behavior with respect to arts goods. An illustration of the consumer’s choice behavior on expenditure shares is simulated as a simple Markov chain. This is followed by a...

This paper proposes a new test to distinguish between the two leading theories of discrimination: preference versus information. Discrimination based on preferences occurs when people behave as if they refuse to change their stereotypes about the capabilities of discriminated individuals. Those...