We analyze equilibria of two-player contests where players have intention-based preferences. We find that players invest more effort compared to the case with selfish preferences and are even willing to exert effort when the monetary value of the prize converges to zero. As a consequence,...

An active area of research within economics concerns the underpinnings of why people give to charitable causes. This study takes a new approach to this question by exploring motivations for giving among children aged 3–5. Using data gathered from 122 children, our artefactual field experiment...

This paper evaluates professional forecasters’ behavior using a panel data of individual forecasts. We find that (i) professional forecasts are behavioral, and (ii) there exists a stock–bond dissonance: the forecasting behavior seems to be stubborn in the stock market, but jumpy in the bond...

We quantify the welfare gains from better retirement planning using a model in which retirement planning is time inconsistent. A modest increase in a household’s planning horizon by just a few years generates large aggregate and individual welfare gains.

Linear altruism predicts the estimated preferences to be independent of the subject’s position in the game, if the role allocation is randomly determined, because subjects, in each role, have the same preferences ex ante. We test and reject this hypothesis.

We analyze a task-assignment model in which a principal assigns a task to one of two agents depending on future states. If the agents have concave utility, the principal assigns the task to them contingent on the state. We show that if the agents are loss averse, a state-independent...

How do people react to a mix of good deeds to a third party and bad deeds against them? A modified ultimatum game shows that previous good deeds make responders substantially more tolerant to unfair proposals.

In this study we investigate if risk attitudes explain non-enrollment into Medicare Part D. We find that respondents who are risk-tolerant as measured by the willingness-to-pay for a hypothetical insurance were significantly less likely to enroll in Part D.

We develop a decision framework with imperfect information to analyze the effects of transaction costs on the tendency for individuals to remain with a default option. We demonstrate how transaction costs can be a more important source of such default effects than commonly thought. A further,...

Is it possible to elicit reliable assessment from an assessor having a conflict of interest (e.g. a professor that writes a recommendation letter for a formal PhD student)? We propose an experimental test and show that compared to a not-incentivized assessment, a promise to give a truthful...