This paper offers an explanation of value-reducing mergers and stock market driven takeovers by introducing recent research on aspiration levels and individual decision making under risk. If market valuation constitutes an aspiration level for managers, we show that managers may be tempted to...

Several studies have shown that aspiration levels are a relevant aspect of decision making. We develop a model that takes this into account. We include the overall probabilities of success and failure, i.e. the probabilities of reaching and not reaching the aspiration level, into an expected...

The descriptive power of expected utility has been challenged by behavioral evidence showing that people deviate systematically from the expected utility paradigm. Since the end of the 70's several alternatives to the classical expected utility paradigm have been proposed in order to accommodate...

Among the most popular models for decision under risk and uncertainty are the rank-dependent models, introduced by Quiggin and Schmeidler.Central concepts in these models are rank-dependence and comonotonicity.It has been suggested in the literature that these concepts are technical tools that...

This paper shows how de Finetti's book-making principle, commonly used to justify additive subjective probabilities, can be modi-ed to agree with some nonexpected utility models.More precisely, a new foundation of the rank-dependent models is presented that is based on a comonotonic extension of...

This paper presents a model for the "gambling effect," i.e., the effect that risky gambles are evaluated differently than riskless outcomes due to an intrinsic utility (or disutility) of gambling.The model turns out to violate stochastic dominance and therefore its primary applications will be...

This paper offers a new explanation of value-reducing mergers and stock market driven takeovers by introducing recent research on aspiration levels and individual decision making under risk. If market valuation constitutes an aspiration level for managers, we show that managers may be tempted to...

This paper focuses on decisions under ambiguity. Participants in a laboratory experiment made decisions in three different settings: (a) individually, (b) individually after discussing the decisions with two others, and (c) in groups of three. We show that groups are more likely to make...