Although the role of formal and informal institutions in promoting economic growth and sustaining exchange relations is now well established, explaining and differentiating how informal and formal rules affect individual behavior remain a challenge. This study aims to distill the essential...

We study theoretically and experimentally decision making under uncertainty in a social environment. We introduce an interdependent preferences model that assumes that the decision maker evaluates monetary outcomes in relation both with his individual and his social reference point. In the...

This paper experimentally investigates individual information acquisition and decisions in ambiguous situations in which the degree of ambiguity can endogenously and individually be decreased by the subjects. In particular, I analyze how risk aversion, ambiguity attitude and personality traits...

This paper focuses on information acquisition and individual decision making in ambiguous situations and presents a novel experimental design which may help to tackle open questions from a fresh perspective. Instead of giving subjects the choice between risky and ambiguous Ellsberg urns, we let...

In an experiment that elicits subjects’ willingness to pay (WTP) for the outcome of a lottery, we confirm the fourfold pattern of risk attitudes described by Kahneman and Tversky. In addition, we document a systematic effect of stake sizes on the magnitude and sign of the relative risk...

It has been widely documented in laboratory experiments that subjects act more risk-averse when they make their decisions frequently (e.g., one as opposed to several decisions at a time), a phenomenon dubbed "myopic loss aversion" by Benartzi and Thaler (1995). The present paper uses two new...

In standard models of ambiguity, the evaluation of an ambiguous asset, as of a risky asset, is considered as an independent process. In this process only information directly pertaining to the ambiguous asset is used. These models face signi ficant challenges from the finding that ambiguity...

We propose that there are three determinants of sender behavior in trust games: Beliefs re-garding the amounts returned, risk aversion, and reciprocity. Particularly, we are interested in the role of reciprocity because the possibility of negative expected reciprocal utility may lead to...

Anxiety is often associated with poor economic outcomes, including earning 13% to 18% less than non-anxious peers. On the other hand, few studies explore how anxiety affects an individual's economic behavior. In part, this is due to a limited focus of clinical research on the impact of...