Activating mutations in fibroblast growth factor receptor 3 (FGFR3) have been identified in multiple types of human cancer and in congenital birth defects. In human lung cancer, fibroblast growth factor 9 (FGF9), a high-affinity ligand for FGFR3, is overexpressed in 10% of primary resected non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) specimens. Furthermore, in a mouse model where FGF9 can be induced in l...

This paper presents a nonparametric model of interdependent preferences, where an individual’s consumption may act as an externality on the preferences of other consumers. We assume that individual price consumption data is observed for all consumers. It is known that the general consumption model with externalities imposes few restrictions on the observed data, where the consistency requiremen...

In a simple conceptual framework, we organize a multitude of phenomena related to the (mis)prediction of utility. Consequences in terms of distorted choices and lower wellbeing emerge if people have to trade-off between alternatives that are characterized by attributes satisfying extrinsic desires and alternatives serving intrinsic needs. Thereby the neglect of asymmetries in adaptation is prop...

Motivated by the extensive evidence about the relevance of status quo bias both in experiments and in real markets, we study this phenomenon from a decisiontheoretic prospective, focusing on the case of preferences under uncertainty. We develop an axiomatic framework that takes as a primitive the preferences of the agent for each possible status quo option, and provide a characterization accord...

We introduce the concept of a conditional small world event domain—an extension of Savage’s [The Foundations of Statistics, Wiley, NewYork, 1954] notion of a ‘small world’—as a self-contained collection of comparable events. Under weak behavioral conditions we demonstrate probabilistic sophistication in any small world event domain without relying on monotonicity or continuity. Probabilistic so...

Ofer H. Azar* Department of Economics Northwestern University June 2003 Abstract The paper presents a model of the evolution of social norms. When a norm is costly to follow and people do not derive benefits from following it except for avoiding social disapproval, the norm erodes over time. Tip percentages, however, increased over the years, suggesting that people derive benefits from tipping,...

Supermodularity has long been regarded as a natural notion of complementarities in individual decision making; it was introduced as such in the nineteenth century by Edgeworth and Pareto. But supermodularity is not an ordinal property. We study the ordinal content of assuming a supermodular utility, i.e. what it means for the individual’s underlying preferences. We show that supermodularity is ...

The higher our aspirations, the higher the probability that we have to adjust them downwards when forming more realistic expectations later on. This paper shows that the costs induced by high aspirations are not trivial. We first develop a theoretical framework to identify the factors that determine the effect of aspirations on expected utility. Then we present evidence from a lab experiment on...

Advertising must compete for the attention of prospective consumers, and attention is a scarce resource. "Junk" mail, "spam" e-mail, telemarketing ’phone calls, and advertising messages generally have the common feature that both sides of the market (advertisers and prospective customers) need to apply effort to generate a transaction. Message recipients supply attention according to expected c...

The primary objective of this paper is to develop a framework in which a decisionmaker may have subjective beliefs about the “riskiness” of prospects, even though the risk structure of these prospects is objectively specified. Put differently, we investigate preferences over risky alternatives by postulating that such preferences arise from more basic preferences that act on the subjective tran...