What explains the mixed evidence from laboratory tests of Kőszegi and Rabin's (2006 and later) model of expectations-based reference-dependent preferences? We investigate one hypothesis: to become (behavior-affecting) reference points, probability beliefs have to sink in--being merely lagged,...

This chapter was prepared for Elsevier's Handbook of Social Economics (edited by Jess Benhabib, Alberto Bisin, and Matthew Jackson). It brings together some of the recent empirical and experimental evidence regarding preferences for social status. While briefly reviewing evidence from different...

How do people compare bundles of social-distancing behaviors? During the COVID pandemic, we showed 676 online respondents in the US, UK, and Israel 30 pairs of brief videos of acquaintances meeting. We asked them to indicate which in each pair depicted greater risk of COVID infection. Their...

We propose and initiate the study of privacy elasticity—the responsiveness of economic variables to small changes in the level of privacy given to participants in an economic system. Individuals rarely experience either full privacy or a complete lack of privacy; we propose to use differential...

Gill and Prowse (2012) conduct an experiment where an agent who is loss averse around her endogenous choice-acclimating expectations-based reference point is predicted to decrease effort with her rival’s effort (a “discouragement effect”). We adapt their human-human to a human-robot...

This chapter brings together some of the recent empirical and experimental evidence regarding preferences for social status. While briefly reviewing evidence from different literatures that is consistent with the existence of preferences for status, we pay special attention to experimental work...