Laboratory experiments employing an induced-values methodology report on allocative efficiencies observed. That methodology requires experimenters know subjects’ motivations, impossible in field experiments. Allocative efficiency implies a hypothetical costless aftermarket would be inactive. An allocation mechanism’s outcome is defined to be behaviorally efficient if an appropriate aftermarket ...

Classical decision theory models behaviour in terms of utility maximisation where utilities represent rational preference relations over outcomes. However, empirical evidence and theoretical considerations suggest that we need to go beyond this framework. We propose to represent goals by higherorder functions or operators that take other functions as arguments where the max and argmax operators...

This paper presents the Global Preference Survey, a globally representative dataset on risk and time preferences, positive and negative reciprocity, altruism, and trust. We collected these preference data as well as a rich set of covariates for 80,000 individuals, drawn as representative samples from 76 countries around the world, representing 90 percent of both the world’s population and globa...

In this paper we report the results of a laboratory experiment, in which we observed the behavior of agents in a simple macroeconomic setting. The structure of the economy was only partially known to the players which is a realistic feature of our experiment. We investigate whether subjects manage to approach optimal behavior even if they lack important information. Furthermore, we analyze subj...

We investigate to what extent genuine social preferences can explain observed other-regarding behavior. In a social dilemma situation (a dictator game variant), subjects can choose whether to learn about the consequences of their choice for the receiver. We find that a majority of subjects showing other-regarding behavior when the payoffs of the receiver are known choose to ignore them if possi...

where α, γ, ω are given real constants. Equation (1) was first introduced as a model describing propagation of unidirectional gravitational waves in a shallow water approximation over a flat bottom, with u representing the fluid velocity [DGH01]. For α = 0 and for α = 1, γ = 0 we obtain the Korteweg–de Vries and the Camassa–Holm [CH93, J02] equations, respectively. Both of them describe unidire...

Psychological and Biological Foundations of Time Preference: Evidence from a Day Reconstruction Study with Biological Tracking This paper considers the relationship between the economic concept of time preference and relevant concepts from psychology and biology. Using novel data from a time diary study conducted in Ireland that combined detailed psychometric testing with medical testing and re...

In this paper we consider the classical problem of dividing a land among many agents so that everybody is satisfied with the parcel she receives. In the literature, it is usually assumed that all the agents are endowed with cardinally comparable, additive, and monotone utility functions. In many economic and political situations violations of these assumptions may arise. We show how a family of...

Given a set of vector outcomes and the set of lotteries over it, we define sets of (a) von Neumann-Morgenstern representations of cardinal preferences over the lotteries, (b) mappings that yield the certainty equivalent outcomes corresponding to a lottery, (c) mappings that yield the risk premia corresponding to a lottery, (d) mappings that yield the acceptance set of lotteries corresponding to...

I examine the impact of happiness on economic behavior. I use self-reported happiness data from the DNB Household Survey from the Netherlands and the German SocioEconomic Panel. I consider changes in regional sunshine as an exogenous determinant of happiness. Both long-run and transitory increases in sunshine increase happiness. Instrumenting individual happiness with regional sunshine, I find ...