This Brief sheds new light on three specific aspects of economic behavior - companies offering prize promotions, individuals making anonymous donations, and politicians creating political advertisements. These are considered signals that firms send to consumers, donors send to others, and...

We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs...

We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs...

We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs...

We compare different designs that have been used to test for an impact of time horizon on discounting, using real incentives and two representative data sets. With the most commonly used type of design we replicate the typical finding of declining (hyperbolic) discounting, but with other designs...

Many durable products cannot be used without a contingent consumable product, e.g. printers require ink, iPods require songs, razors require blades, etc. For such products, manufacturers may be able to lock-in consumers by making their products incompatible with consumables that are produced by...

We analyze the problem of optimal public investment when government purchases of productive capital assets are financed through income taxes. Virtually all previous work in this literature has prescribed a share of public investment in GDP that is both constant and time consistent. This paper...

In this paper we analyze a stochastic continuous time model in finite horizon in which the agent discounts the instantaneous utility function and the final function at constant but different instantaneous discount rates of time preference. Within this context we can model problems in which, when...

Dybvig [1995] finds optimal spending and investment strategies for a perpetual endowment that has no tolerance for spending declines. His spending rule is a ratchet --- spending never decreases, but has a substantial chance of increasing. We find the ratchet consumption rule for an investor with...

A number of conditional transition probability models make use of side information - explanatory variable values known only initially and useful for predicting transitions of the variables of interest. For example, the Cox Proportional Hazard Model is used to provide future hazard arrival...