Amos Tversky (1937-1996), a towering figure in cognitive and mathematical psychology, devoted his professional life to the study of similarity, judgment, and decision making. He had a unique ability to master the technicalities of normative ideals and then to intuit and demonstrate...

In a complex and uncertain world, humans and animals make decisions under the constraints of limited knowledge, resources, and time. Yet models of rational decision making in economics, cognitive science, biology, and other fields largely ignore these real constraints and instead assume agents...

Anyone who watches the television news has seen images of firefighters rescuing people from burning buildings and paramedics treating bombing victims. How do these individuals make the split-second decisions that save lives? Most studies of decision making, based on artificial tasks assigned in...

This paper compares the effective rates of taxation faced by a representative investor located in a major capital-exporting country for investments in machinery and buildings in nine capital-importing European countries. Poland and Hungary are found to have relatively high effective tax rates on...

The financial crisis of 2008 raised crucial questions regarding the effectiveness of the way the United States regulates financial markets. What caused the crisis? What regulatory changes are most needed and desirable? What regulatory structure will best implement the desired changes? This...

Stephen Axilrod is the ultimate Federal Reserve insider. He worked at the Fed’s Board of Governors for more than thirty years and after that in private markets and as a consultant on monetary policy. With Inside the Fed, he offers his unique perspective on the inner workings of the Federal...

For ten boom-powered years at the turn of the twenty-first century, some of America’s most prominent law and accounting firms created and marketed products that enabled the very rich--including newly minted dot-com millionaires--to avoid paying their fair share of taxes by claiming benefits...