The creation and effects of social capital have seldom been a target for systematic analysis in orthodox economics. The purpose of the paper is to argue that in order to include social capital, along with physical and human, into economic analysis, we have to regard human preferences as...

Social institutions are persistent regularities in contracting and other relations amongst men and in the unintended consequences of such rule-like behavior. They include morality and law as well as institutions of governance such as branding and advertising. Institutions are studied in all...

Current time allocation and household production models face three major weaknesses: First, they only describe the average time allocation. Thus, information about the order of activities is lost. Therefore, it is impossible to describe the influence of activities on later ones. Such...

We theoretically show that there is a fundamental disconnect be- tween the disposition effect, i.e., investors’ tendency to sell winning assets too early and losing assets too late, and its common empirical measure, namely a positive difference between the proportion of gains and losses re-...

This paper explores the optimal provision of dynamic incentives for employees with reciprocal preferences. Building on the presumption that a relational contract can establish a norm of reciprocity, I show that generous upfront wages that activate an employee’s reciprocal preferences are more...

We study a model of task completion with the opportunity to learn about own self-control problems over time. While the agent is initially uncertain about her future self-control, in each period she can choose to learn about it by paying a non-negative learning cost and spending one period. If...

We challenge the standard definition of economic rationality as consistency by making use of a novel distinction between axioms of decision theory: consistency and preference axioms. We argue that this distinction has been overlooked by the literature and, as a result, evidence that consistency...

Traditionally, economic models have attributed procrastination to present bias. However, procrastination may also arise when individuals derive anticipatory utility from holding motivated, overly optimistic beliefs about the workload they need to complete. This study provides a rigorous...

Simple life cycle and permanent income hypotheses imply that changes in consumption should be unforecastable. Rational forward-looking agents ought to smooth consumption over the life cycle and exhaust the asset stock accumulated during the working career in retirement. Empirical observations...

This paper reconsiders the economic explanation of EU regional policy from an evolution- ary perspective. It contrasts the neoclassical equilibrium notions of market and government failure with the prevalent evolutionary neo-Schumpeterian and Austrian-Hayekian perceptions. Based on this...