Social scientists often consider temporal stability when assessing the usefulness of a construct and its measures, but whether behavioral biases display such stability is relatively unknown. We estimate stability for 25 biases, in a nationally representative sample, using repeated elicitations...

This paper deals with one of the main empirical problems associated with the rational addiction theory, namely that its derived demand equation is not empirically distinguishable from models with forward looking behavior, but with time inconsistent preferences. The implication is that, even when...

This paper provides a revealed preference characterisation of quasi-hyperbolic discounting which is designed to be applied to readily-available expenditure surveys. We describe necessary and sufficient conditions for the leading forms of the model and also study the consequences of the...

A new notion of equilibrium, which we call strong equilibrium, is introduced for timeinconsistent stopping problems in continuous time. Compared to the existing notions introduced in Time-Consistent Stopping Under Decreasing Impatience and On Finding Equilibrium Stopping Times for...

Research has shown that procrastination has significant adverse effects on individuals, including lower savings and poorer health. Procrastination is typically modeled as resulting from present bias. In this paper we study an alternative: excessively optimistic beliefs about future demands on an...

Despite the economic relevance of strong political and property rights, we still lack an organic and empirically sound theory of their origins and interaction. In our model, the elite can elicit the nonelite's cooperation in investment by enacting a more inclusive political process, which allows...

In this paper we propose a unified utility deviation-risk model which covers both utility maximization and mean-variance analysis as special cases. We derive the time-consistent Hamilton-Jacobi-Bellman (HJB) equation for the equilibrium value function and significantly reduce the number of state...

In this paper, we study intertemporal social welfare evaluations when agents' discount factors may be different. We first show that there exists a conflict between efficiency, equity, and time consistency, even if all agents share the same discount factor. We argue that this impossibility result...

In a continuous-time setting, the existing notion of equilibrium strategies for time-inconsistent problems in the literature, referred to as weak equilibrium, is not fully aligned with the standard definition of equilibrium in the game theory in that the agent may be willing to deviate from a...