This paper presents a model of real effort provision in conjunction with rational social preference theory to predict how individuals exert effort to replace an exogenously determined ‘‘state of the world’’ with a preferred social outcome. Binary dictator games and real effort tasks are used to examine whether individuals exert effort in a manner that is consistent with their revealed preferenc...

This paper examines the links between community homogeneity and the demand for environmental quality. Using data from California, this paper shows that communities that are more homogeneous in terms of race and educational attainment are more likely to support the public provision of environmental goods, after controlling for political ideology, voter turnout, and the distribution of benefits a...

We consider the problem of learning from revealed preferences in an online setting. In our framework, each period a consumer buys an optimal bundle of goods from a merchant according to her (linear) utility function and current prices, subject to a budget constraint. The merchant observes only the purchased goods, and seeks to adapt prices to optimize his profits. We give an efficient algorithm...

I present a revealed preference ranking of school quality. This is helpful to pin down between two or more schools the one that attracts high ability students at the lowest additional cost of quality. Available school rankings don’t capture the heterogenous effects that an increase in school quality has on the choices of students with different characteristics. To do so, I obtain the ranking by...

Many Internet services rely on consumers disclosing their personal data. Despite heavy usage and wide acceptance of services like Online Social Networks, doubts about sustainability of trusted relationships remain. Surveying consumers about their preferences reveals severe concerns about the fate of their personal data. In stark contrast to privacy concerns (stated preferences), however, consum...

A systematic method for incorporating taste variation into a revealed preference framework for heterogeneous consumers is developed. We create a methodology that enables the recovery of the minimal variation in tastes that are required to rationalise the observed choice patterns. This approach is used to examine the extent to which changes in tobacco consumption have been driven by price change...

Iterated games, in which the same economic interaction is repeatedly played between the same agents, are an important framework for understanding the effectiveness of strategic choices over time. To date, very little work has applied information theory to the information sets used by agents in order to decide what action to take next in such strategic situations. This article looks at the mutua...

Consider the seller’s problem of finding “optimal” prices for her (divisible) goods when faced with a set of consumers, given that she can only observe their purchased bundles at set prices, i.e., access to only revealed preferences (demand oracle). We study both social welfare and profit maximization under this setting, assuming concave valuation function of consumers and convex production cos...

We provide criteria for a set of observed choices to be generated by a quasi-linear preference relation. These criteria are valid if choice sets are compact and downward closed and do not require preferences to be convex. We show that under the added assumption that choice sets can be represented by linear budget sets, our condition also implies the existence of a quasi-linear utility represent...