Institutions may rely on fundamental principles, e.g., of legal philosophy, but may also have evolved according to institutional fitness, as gauged by a society's well-being. In our stylized framework where two fundamental principles, equality and efficiency, conflict with each other, one of the...

This paper tests how subjects behave in an intertemporal consumption/saving experiment when borrowing is allowed and whether subjects treat debt differently than savings. Two treatments create environments where either saving or borrowing is required for optimal consumption. Since both...

We propose a new method to elicit individuals' risk preferences. Similar to Holt and Laury (2002), we use a simple multiple price-list format. However, our method is based on a general notion of increasing risk, which allows classifying individuals as more or less risk-averse without assuming a...

This paper tests how subjects behave in an intertemporal consumption/saving experiment when borrowing is allowed and whether subjects treat debt differently than savings. Two treatments create environments where either saving or borrowing is required for optimal consumption. Since both...

Recent health policy reforms try to increase consumer choice. We use a laboratory experiment to analyze consumers’ tastes in typical contract attributes of health insurances and to investigate their relationship with individual risk preferences. First, subjects make consecutive insurance...

From the viewpoint of the independence axiom of expected utility theory, an interesting empirical dynamic choice problem involves the presence of a “global risk,” that is, a chance of losing everything whichever safe or risky option is chosen. In this experimental study, participants have to...