This paper investigates the preference for the Stackelberg leader/follower roles in a mixed duopoly, where a welfare-maximizing public firm competes with a profit-maximizing private firm. In contrast to the well known relationship in a private duopoly, we demonstrate that if a firm's reaction...

We investigate consumers’ preference for scarcity in a real market with large stakes. We find evidence that the elasticity of demand for scarcity is constant across prices ranging from $50 to nearly $4 million, that preference for scarcity follows a power law, and that it explains 95% of the...

This paper examines the role of simplified heuristics in the formation of preferences for public goods. Political scientists have suggested that voters use simplified heuristics based on the positions of familiar parties to infer how a proposed policy will affect them and to cast a vote in line...

Are preferences for reforms driven by individuals’ own endowments or beliefs? To address this question, we conducted a cross-country survey on people’s opinions on employment protection legislation—an area where reform has proven to be difficult and personal interests are at stake. We find...

We develop a theory of representation of interdependent preferences that reflect the widely acknowledged phenomenon of keeping up with the Joneses (i.e. of those preferences which maintain that well-being depend on "relative standing" in the society as well as on material consumption). The...

In this paper we provide an axiomatic characterization of separable preferences over intertemporal opportunities satisfying “existences of a dummy alternative”. The two properties of preferences over intertemporal opportunities that implies and is implied by separability are the following:...

Preference consistency implies that people have learned their willingness to trade off attributes. We argue that this is not necessarily the case. Instead, we show that when preferences are learned in context (e.g., through repeated choices made from a trinary choice set that includes an...

Understanding the roles of emotion and cognition in forming preferences is critical in helping firms choose effective marketing strategies and consumers make appropriate consumption decisions. In this work, we investigate the role of the emotional and cognitive systems in preference consistency...

This paper presents a cardinal measure of choice consistency for perturbed utility models. The measure of choice consistency is built on additive errors to the model. The additive errors are meaningful since the perturbed utility model is cardinal and utility differences are meaningful. We...

We propose and axiomatically characterize a representation of ambiguity sensitive preferences. The distinguishing feature of our axiomatization is that we do not require preferences to be event-wise separable over any domain of acts. Even without any such separability restrictions, we are able...