Macroeconomic events often require individuals and policy-makers to make decisions that they are not accustomed to making. For example, a sovereign debt crisis makes it necessary to either default on government debt, increase taxes, cut public spending or to impose a mixture of these measures. I...

In four experiments involving choices between apartments, we decomposed predecisional information distortion into positive distortion of information about the tentatively leading alternative and negative distortion of information about the trailing alternative(s). Proleader and antitrailer...

After several decades of academic research on the contingent valuation (CV) method a consistent behavioral explanation of 'hypothetical bias' is still lacking. Based on evidence from economics, economic psychology and the political sciences, I propose an explanation that is based on two simple...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

We extend the contingent valuation (CV) method to test three differing conceptions of individuals' preferences as either: (i) a-priori well-formed or readily divined and revealed through a single dichotomous choice question (as per the NOAA CV guidelines; Arrow et al., 1993]; (ii) learned or...

This paper attempts to detect the existence of links in consumptionpreferences between generations. Preferences for consumption goods may bedetermined by the preferences of parents (vertical transmission) and/or bypreferences arising from the environment (horizontal transmission). Wepropose an...