Firms spend billions of dollars each year advertising consumer products in order to influence demand. Much of these outlays are on the creative design of advertising content. Creative content often uses nuances of presentation and framing that have large effects on consumer decision making in...

The prospect theory is one of the most popular decision-making theories. It is based on the S-shaped utility function, unlike the von Neumann and Morgenstern (NM) theory, which is based on the concave utility function. The S-shape brings in mathematical challenges: simple extensions and...

Numerous laboratory studies report on behaviors inconsistent with rational economic models. How much do these inconsistencies matter in natural settings, when consumers make large, real decisions and have the opportunity to learn from experiences? We report on a field experiment designed to...

This paper relates firm size and opportunism by showing that, given certain behavioral dispositions of humans, the size of a profit-maximizing firm can be determined by cognitive aspects underlying firm-internal cultural transmission processes. We argue that what firms do better than markets -...

This paper applies the concept of damage coefficients introduced in Houba and Kremers (2008) to provide an estimate of the cost of climate change - in particular the cost of changes in mean regional temperature and precipitation - to the fruit vegetation sector. We concentrate on the production...

We analyze the impact on a firm's profits and optimal wage rates, and on the distribution of workers' earnings, when workers compare their earnings with those of co-workers. We consider a low-productivity worker who receives lower wage earnings than a high-productivity worker. When the...

Given the advantages of specialization, employers encourage their employees to acquire distinct expertise to better satisfy clients' needs. However, when the client is unaware of the employees' expertise and cannot be sorted out to the most competent employee by means of a gatekeeper, a mismatch...

We consider firms' choices between a clean technology that benefits, and a dirty technology that harms, the environment. Green firms are more suited to the clean, and brown firms are more suited to the dirty technology. We use a model derived from complexity theory that takes account of true...

We consider technology choices between green and brown technologies by firms. We use insights from complexity theory and also take account of true uncertainty in designing public policy. The green technology offers relatively higher returns to scale from adoption, and there are type-contingent...

This paper analyzes a boundedly rational decision maker who is uncertain about his preference and faces the following trade-off: adding a good to the choice set has a positive option value but increases the complexity of the choice problem. The increased complexity is modeled as a reduction of...