Retailers routinely post two prices on the price tag - a posted or sale price, and a higher regular or an advertised reference price. Together, these prices create a perception of an initial discount that the consumer is getting. In this paper, we investigate the impact of this initial perceived...

Economists typically assume that preferences are fixed - that people know what they like and how much they like it relative to all other things, and that this rank-ordering is stable over time. But this assumption has never been accepted by any other discipline. Economists are increasingly...

This article examines the meaning of consumers' sovereignty in the interwar thought of the economist William Harold Hutt. For Hutt, consumers' sovereignty was an ideal, a norm against which economists could assess different economic systems. It connected the value of individual freedom, the...

The recognition of the key importance of economic stability after World War I sparked interest in business forecasting on both sides of the Atlantic. This article explores the creation and the rapid international and domestic dissemination of the Harvard Index of General Business Conditions in...

La voz y la lealtad cumplen un papel importante porque facilitan los ajustes en el mercado y mejoran la eficiencia. La teoría convencional establece una relación inmediata entre los precios y la salida, y desconoce las complejidades que introduce la interacción humana en los mercados. La voz...

In this paper we investigate the size of the consumption drop at retirement in Italy. We use micro data on food and total non-durable household spending covering the period 1993-2004, and evaluate the change in consumption that accompanies retirement by exploiting the exogenous variability in...

We test whether laboratory measures of individual preferences for risk and guilt relate to risk-connected behaviors in a pandemic, such as socializing, dining in at restaurants, and hand washing. We also investigate how guilt and risk aversion relate to the impact of governmental...

This study uses the 2009 Financial Capability Study dataset to examine the association between individuals' financial literacy and their costly borrowing decisions. The results indicate that financial literacy is indeed negatively associated with costly borrowing behaviors. Other factors such as...

This article examines how dynamic changes in information cost structure and time preferences affect consumers' search and switching behavior over time and lead to lock-in. The information cost structure is conceptualized as a tradeoff of initial setup costs and ongoing usage costs. Lock-in is...

Common intuition and experimental psychology suggest that the ability to self-regulate ("willpower") is a depletable resource. We investigate the behavior of an agent with limited willpower who optimally consumes over time an endowment of a tempting and storable consumption good or "cake". We...