One striking observation in the history of rational choice models is that those models have not only been used in economics but spread widely across the social and behavioral sciences. How do such model transfers proceed? By closely studying the early efforts to transfer such models by William...

The goal of the research is to study the human behaviour in decision making and test if the decisions are made through “relative rationality”. The relative rationality’s idea of the research is to incorporate emotion within the decision-making process to calculate what the researcher has...

Historically, economic models of memory have failed to incorporate one of its critical features: decay. It has long been established that memories fade over time, losing fidelity. In this paper we show that a framework of rational memory with decay can produce the recency effect and other...

The strategy method is often used in public goods games to measure an individual's willingness to cooperate depending on the level of cooperation by their groupmates (conditional cooperation). However, while the strategy method is informative, it risks conflating confusion with a desire for fair...

We argue in favor of a departure from the equilibrium approach in game theory towards the less ambitious goal of describing only the actual behavior of rational players. The notions of Nash equilibrium and its refinements require a specification of the players' choices and beliefs not only along...

We study belief updating about relative performance in an ego-relevant task. Manipulating the perceived ego-relevance of the task, we show that subjects update their beliefs optimistically because they derive direct utility flows from holding positive beliefs. This finding provides a behavioral...

Extant theories on the disposition effect are largely silent on most of the disposition-effect related trading patterns, including the V-shaped probabilities of buying and selling against unrealized profit. On the other hand, portfolio rebalancing and learning have been shown to be important,...

Levy (2002) and Dragone (2009) showed that rational agents tend to become overweight. Their result is shown to be equivalent to a seemingly innocuous assumption placed on the instantaneous utility function. It is also shown that their models can rationalize agents who are underweight, or even...