Previous experimental results show clearly that many subjects do not optimize when solving a life-cycle consumption problem. What do they do? This paper attempts to resolve this question, looking at the discounting, hyperbolic and rolling models as possible explanations. Data from two...

There is widespread concern that favoring suppliers with good past performance, a standard practice in private procurement, may hinder entry by new firms in public procurement markets. In this paper we report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the relationship between reputation and...

Experiments on intertemporal consumption typically show that people have difficulties in optimally solving such problems. Previous studies have focused on contexts in which agents are faced with risky future incomes and have to plan over long horizons. We present an experiment comparing decision...

We report results from a laboratory experiment exploring the extent to which individuals can solve a deterministic, intertemporal lifecycle consumption optimization problem and the effect of revealing social information on past average consumption amounts; as all individuals have identical...

Using a unique experimental subject pool, I analyse the behaviour of subjects in a life-cycle consumption experimental task. As in previous experiments, it is clear that different subjects solve the task differently – some having strategies close to the fully optimal and others using...

This paper extends the literature on the estimation of expected utility and non-expected-utility preference functionals (and the consequent exploration of the superiority of non-expected-utility over expected utility preference functionals) to a comparison of two different ways (pairwise choice...