Past research has provided evidence of the role of some personal characteristics as risk factors for depression. However, few studies have examined jointly their specific impact and whether country characteristics change the probability of being depressed. In general, this is due to the use of single-country databases. The aim of this paper is to extend previous findings by employing a much lar...

The Economics of Altruistic Punishment and the Demise of Cooperation Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent experimental evidence suggests that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism to maintain cooperation among humans. In this paper we explore the boundary condit...

When rationality is bounded, a variety of factors may influence how far a choice is from optimal. We examine the willingness to search among alternatives. We find fixed individual differences in this temperament measure. People may be usefully typed according to how they obtain improved choices. More patient subjects obtain improvement by effectively using decision resources, performing better ...

I study Nash implementation when agents might use a tie-breaking rule to choose among the messages they are materially indifferent between. If the planner is endowed with the knowledge of the rule, this might expand or shrink the set of implementable social choice correspondences (SCC) depending on the particular rule used by the agents. The effect might be considerable. For instance, there exi...

While the concept of “expected utility” informs many theories of decision making, little is known about whether and how the human brain might compute this quantity. This article reviews a series of functional magnetic resonance imaging (FMRI) experiments designed to localize brain regions that respond in anticipation of increasing amounts of monetary incentives. These studies collectively sugge...

A subjective expected utility agent is given information about the state of the world in the form of a set of possible priors. She is allowed to condition her prior on this information. A set of priors may be updated according to Bayes’ rule, prior-by-prior, upon learning that some state of the world has not obtained. We show that there exists no decision maker who obeys Bayes’ rule, conditions...

The endowment effect has been widely documented. Recent models of reference-dependent preferences indicate that expectations play a prominent role in the presence of the phenomenon. A subset of such expectations-based models predicts an endowment effect for risk when reference points change from certain to stochastic. In two purposefully simple risk preference experiments, eliminating often-dis...

Newcomb's problem is viewed as a dynamic game with an agent and a superior being as players. Depending on whether or not a risk-neutral agent's confidence in the superior being, as measured by a subjective probability assigned to the move order, exceeds a threshold or not, one obtains the one-box outcome or the two-box outcome, respectively. The findings are extended to an agent with arbitrary ...

This paper presents another definition of substitutes and complements. It follows a dual approach using the Luenberger’s benefit function. The benefit function measures the amount of a reference bundle that an individual would be willing to give up to move from a given utility level to any bundle. Therefore the benefit function associates to any bundle of goods another bundle that lies on a giv...

In this paper we assess the importance of sample type in the estimation of risk preferences. We elicit and compare risk preferences from student subjects and subjects drawn from the general population, using the multiple price list method devised by Holt and Laury in their paper Risk Aversion and Incentive Effects (2002). We find evidence suggesting that under rank dependent utility, students e...