Interest in behavioral economics has grown in recent years, stimulated largely by accumulating evidence that the standard model of consumer decision making provides an inadequate, positive description of human behavior. Behavioral models are increasingly finding their way into policy evaluation,...

Genes can affect behaviour towards risks through at least two distinct neurocomputational mechanisms: they may affect the value assigned to different risky options, or they may affect the way in which the brain adjudicates between options based on their value. We combined methods from...

How do we make decisions when confronted with several alternatives (e.g., on a supermarket shelf)? Previous work has shown that accumulator models, such as the drift-diffusion model, can provide accurate descriptions of the psychometric data for binary value-based choices, and that the choice...

We introduce a model of a local public goods economy with a continuum of agents and jurisdictions with finite but unbounded populations, where the set of possible projects for each jurisdiction/club is unrestricted in size. Under boundedness of per capita payoffs, which simply ensures that equal...

This dissertation is divided into three essays. The first essay focuses on the question of enfranchisement of groups of individuals. Existing research work in the area has not adequately addressed this question. Indeed, previous analyses have focused on the value of a vote for a single...

This thesis examines the strategic incentives of market players under constrained situations that generate economic externalities. The first chapter considers a model of competition in which economic activity takes place through networks of bilateral interactions. Economic externalities in this...