We model the educational choice of students whose objectives in terms of salary are conditioned by their social origins. We assume that students from a poor background have a lower reference point than students with wealthier origins. We then study the efficiency of a policy of tuition fees as a...

Conventional normative economics is built on the assumption that people act as if seeking to satisfy coherent and a priori preferences. This model has however been challenged by many empirical works highlighting the existence of systematic deviations from the behaviour predicted by the...

The representation of the individual in economics as a rational homo oeconomicus had been seriously questioned by the development of behavioural economics. Some authors nevertheless argue that economists do not need to produce complex models of human behaviour, since such investigation does not...