This paper attempts to bring some central insights from behavioural economics into the economics of climate change. In particular, it discusses (i) implications of prospect theory, the equity premium puzzle, and time-inconsistent preferences in the choice of discount rate used in climate-change...

Public choice theorists generally assume that bureaucrats seek to maximize their own utility functions, subject to externally imposed constraints. Changes in constraint values may, therefore, be expected to result in predictable changes in the behavior of most organizations, not just businesses....

Consumers often encounter reminders of resource scarcity. However, relatively little is known about the psychological processes that such reminders instantiate. In this article, we posit that reminders of resource scarcity activate a competitive orientation, which guides consumers’ decision...

I distinguish four types of goals: self-interested, altruistic, moralistic, and moral. Moralistic goals are those that people attempt to impose on others, regardless of the others' true interests. These may become prominent in political behavior such as voting because such behavior has...

Individualistically-oriented negotiators do worse than cooperatively-oriented negotiators, even when they are engaging in similar behaviors. This paper proposes and test hypotheses about negotiators' motivations and their behaviors in a repeated measures design. Individualistic negotiators...

Public choice theory (PCT) has had a powerful influence on political science and, to a lesser extent, on public administration. Based on the premise that public officials are rational maximizers of their own utility, PCT has a quite successful record of correctly predicting governmental...

We investigate the effect of different procedures for assigning decision-making roles for the distribution of collective resources using a dictator game. Three role allocation procedures are tested, namely random, meritocratic, and favouritism. We contribute to the literature by employing an...

Theories that reject the existence of altruism presume that emotional benefits serve as ulterior motives for doing good deeds. These theories argue that even in the absence of material and reputational benefits, individuals reap utility from the feelings associated with doing good. In response...

In this research, we draw on the characteristics of disgust — an affective state that prompts a self-protection response — to demonstrate that experiencing disgust can also increase self-interested, unethical behaviors such as cheating. This series of studies contributes to the literature...

In many economic situations, individuals with different bargaining power must agree on how to divide a given resource. For instance, in the dictator game the proposer has all the bargaining power. In spite of it, the majority of controlled experiments show that she shares an important amount of...