I present a theoretical framework that shows how self-control could have evolved as a mechanism to make humans behave against their own self-interest. I analyze the evolution of self-control in a principal-agent framework, in which the agent has access to private information, but his utility...

Low insurance take-up in low-income populations is not easily explained by the standard single-period expected utility model of insurance that overlooks the relevance of time preference when liquidity is constrained. We design field survey instruments to elicit quasi-hyperbolic time preferences,...

We investigate the roles of the level and variability in quality in driving customer retention for a new service. We present model-free evidence that while high average quality helps in retaining customers, high variability leads to higher termination rates. Apart from these main effects, we use...

Preferences are key for shaping decision-making, yet it remains an open question where preferences originate from. We investigate the causal effect of the childhood social environment on adults’ preferences. We utilize a natural experiment in Denmark, which randomized refugees to different...

In this note, we consider early evidence regarding behavioural responses to an emerging public health emergency. We explore patterns in stadium attendance demand by exploiting match-level data from the Belarusian Premier League (BPL), a football competition that kept playing unrestricted in...

While many puzzles in static choices under risk can be explained by a preference for positive and an aversion toward negative skewness, little is known about the implications of such skewness preferences for decision making in dynamic problems. Indeed, skewness preferences might play an even...

In this paper, the problem of inconsistent dynamic choice is discussed, as considered in the literature, both under certainty in the context of changing preferences, and under risk and uncertainty in the case of preference orderings which violate expected utility theory. The problem of...

We propose a class of dynamic models that capture subjective (and hence unobservable) constraints on the amount of information a decision maker can acquire, pay attention to, or absorb, via an Information Choice Process (icp). An icp specifies the information that can be acquired about the...

By using a two-country model with habit-forming consumers, this paper shows that the transfer paradox can take place in the free-trade, dynamically-stable world economy. When the debtor is more habituated to consumption than the creditor, an income transfer from the creditor to the debtor raises...

Economic interdependence of heterogeneous habit forming consumers is examined by using a two-country model. Due to endogenous interest rate adjustments, consumption-habit dynamics in one country are affected by the other country’s habits and preferences. To characterize the interactive...