Using a lifecycle framework with Epstein-Zin (1989) utility and a mixed-integer optimization approach, we compute the optimal age to claim Social Security benefits. Taking advantage of homogeneity, a sufficient statistic is the ratio of wealth to the primary insurance amount (PIA). If the...

There have been arguments concerning the ability to measure rational belief. In this debate, a credence or belief has been determined as being measurable by some authors and subjectively orderable by others. I would argue that our conceptual evaluation of belief is more accurately expressed as a...

Belief elicitation is important in many different felds of economic research. We show that how a researcher elicits such beliefs-in particular, whether the belief is about the participant's opponent, an unrelated other, or the population of others-affects the processes involved in the formation...

This paper focuses on Social Security benefit claiming behavior, a take-up decision that has been ignored in the previous literature. Using financial calculations and simulations based on an expected utility maximization model, we show that delaying benefit claim for a period of time after...

This paper uses the notion of augmented utility to summarize models of utility maximization (MUM). The models covered include non-separable utility maximization and common behavioral models of discounting. Moreover, the paper provides as novel special cases necessary and sufficient conditions...